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Day Six |
With its 14 towers, San Gimignano is sometimes called the Italian Manhattan but with a slight difference: its 72 towers are around 800 years old. |
There use to be more, but due to unstable foundations most of them have tipped over. |
When you look at them for the first time you would think that they were built for some great purpose, or maybe they served as a defensive system, or maybe they were used as some medieval scientific way to store food but the simple truth is that they were nothing more than a fashion statement. The richer you were the bigger tower you had. And since people were building their towers taller and taller, the city elders put a stop to that and limited the height to 51 m. Well, witty Italian "showoffs" found a way around this: if you can't build the tallest tower in town, you start building twin towers! |
With a rock wall surrounding the city and several arched gates, San Gimignano is a great example of a Tuscan hill town and is also considered to be one of the best preserved medieval towns in Italy. We walked the city streets, listened to street musicians, had a nice dinner on a terrace that offered a view of the Tuscan landscape lit by the setting sun. |
