Today’s intended travels were supposed to included San Gimignano and Volterra. I only got as far as San Gimignano.

But before all of that, I did remember to take some shots of both my room and my hotel. Due to a mistake on my part I had to upgrade my room a bit to get my desired departure date. I had sort of forgotten about this until I walked into my room, it’s a bit bigger than I need.

The semi-tower on the hotel is my room, a little bit much but still pretty neat. Only problem is the hotel wifi does not reach consistently into either of my rooms so I’m writing all this on a bench by the front door.

Now as I have said, I meant to see two towns today but San Gimignano took much more time to do as thoroughly as I wanted to. Last time I had been to Tuscany, San Gimignano was the first town I got to explore. I only got to spend part of an afternoon there so this time I wanted to make sure I had plenty of time.

San Gimignano is special in Tuscan towns in that it has multiple towers throughout it. These towers were statements of wealth and power when they were built because nothing says “I’m richer than you” than a tall, expensive tower standing over your neighbor’s home. In a time when most regular buildings were between two and three stories, having a town where the skyline really goes up as you walk along the streets must have been an impressive sight! In my mind, it still is. You get a similar sensation to walking the streets of New York, where you find yourself tilting your head back constantly to see the tops of the buildings.

Some kind souls in the town created models to show what the town would have looked like in the 1300’s.

The town is very popular with tourists and even at this time of year was quite busy. San Gimignano is unashamedly a tourist town but I think they do it very tastefully. The do have much of the same style of cheap gifts I found in Split but not nearly as many were on display at the front doors. There was also a lot of hand made local items, local food products and local art.

Yes, the last photo is fresh truffles and yes, really, really liked all of the stuffed boars at the butcher shops. They were hilarious!

I went into several churches, only one of which you could take pictures in, as well as the local Torture Museum. I will only be showing pictures of the Inquisition symbol and a jacket that was also used to hunt bears in addition to being a jacket for jailers. The items on display in the museum really shouldn’t be glorified in any way and the curators at the museum were very careful to explain why each item was cruel and should not be used again.

I had a wonderful lunch of pecorino cheese, honey and pear along with tagliatelle and porcini mushrooms. After lunch some gelato was in order but I was not going to wait in line for a maker that won the world championship for several years, I’m not that patient.

The rest of the day was spent wandering the streets and just enjoying the beautiful day! Most of the day was fairly sunny and warm enough that a light sweater was all that was called for. I still saw many people wearing winter coats and after walking up some of the steps I’m not sure why they still needed them.

By the time 3 PM rolled around I realized that I was not going to make in to Volterra with any sort of time to actually see anything so I wandered the street, people watched, and just relaxed in general. San Gimignano is one of those towns that really seems set up to just sit back and enjoy the day rather than rush about to see as much as possible. If I don’t get to see Volterra on this trip it just means I’ll need to come back again!