It’s all about the fourteen tall stone towers – “skyscrapers of the Middle Ages” – that make San Gimignano the “most medieval” of all the medieval cities in Tuscany. The fourteen towers, which historically were forty, were not elements of fortress walls and were not bell towers. In the Middle Ages, they served as private “citadels” of the local aristocracy; rich and noble families necessarily built them together with their residential “palazzo”. The tower, towering over the tiled roofs of the city buildings, was supposed to serve as a visual symbol of the high social status, wealth, and power of the owners, and to shelter them in the event of an insidious attack by their neighbours.

The history of the city, however, is not only the Middle Ages, it dates back to the era of Etruscan antiquity, it was then that the first settlement was founded on a hill 334 meters high, which already in the Roman era was named Sylvia. In the 10th century A.D., a town called “San Gimignano” grew up on the site of the settlement after named “San Gimignano” in honor of its patron Saint Geminian of Modena. Due to its favorable location – the strategic Frankish Route (Via Francigena) ran through the city from Northern Europe to Rome, which in the twelfth century turned from a pilgrimage route into the main Western European trade artery, San Gimignano quickly began to grow rich and develop. The “Golden Age” of the medieval city came in the 12th and 14th centuries, when the main architectural monuments that still decorate it were built, including the famous “towers”. At that time, the city’s population reached 15,000 people, twice the number of its current inhabitants.

Besides its towers, San Gimignano boasts another centuries-old heritage – its own great wine history, as the local white wine Vernaccia di San Gimignano has been the most famous white wine in Tuscany for several centuries. As early as the 12th century, Vernaccia’s vine from Liguria was grown on local soil, and two centuries later San Gimignano’s white wine became widely known in Italy, and was even mentioned in Dante and Boccaccio’s works. In the 20th century, Vernaccia di San Gimingano became one of the four first DOC appellations in Italy (1966) and the first “white” DOCG appellation in Tuscany (1993).