Collegiata of San Gimignano

Collegiata of San Gimignano tickets: which one to buy

The Collegiata charges a small ticket that includes the chapel of Santa Fina; a combined version adds the Museum of Sacred Art next door and is only slightly dearer. A separate town pass covers the Palazzo Comunale with its frescoed council chamber and the Torre Grossa, the one tower you can climb, and is the better buy if you are staying several hours. Audio guides are available at the church door. Guided walking tours of San Gimignano include the Collegiata and cost several times the entry;

the town is small enough to see alone with a map. Day trips from Florence and Siena bundle San Gimignano with Volterra or a Chianti tasting and give you two hours here, which is enough for the church and one walk along the walls. Queues form at midday in summer. The Museum of Sacred Art holds the Madonna of the Rose by Bartolo di Fredi and a room of illuminated choir books, and it is usually empty.

Visiting Collegiata of San Gimignano: what to see

The church is not a cathedral, despite the name most visitors use: San Gimignano lost its bishop centuries ago and this is a collegiate church, consecrated in 1148 behind a plain Romanesque front that gives no warning of the inside. Every wall is painted. Bartolo di Fredi covered the north aisle with the Old Testament in the 1360s, Lippo Memmi the south with the New, and Taddeo di Bartolo painted a Last Judgment across the west wall with a hell of unusual specificity.

Benozzo Gozzoli added a St Sebastian in 1464. The chapel of Santa Fina, built in the 1460s, holds frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio of a local girl who died at fifteen after five years lying on a plank, and whose deathbed produced a crop of violets that still grow on the towers each March. Two wooden statues of the Annunciation by Jacopo della Quercia, carved about 1421 and painted by Martino di Bartolomeo, stand under the organ loft.

Collegiata of San Gimignano opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from mid-morning to early evening with a shorter Sunday schedule, and the church closes to visitors during services and for a period at midday in some seasons. It also shuts for two or three weeks in late January. San Gimignano fills with coaches between eleven and four and is beautiful and nearly empty in the evening, which is the argument for staying overnight. The frescoes are lit on a timer and the interior is dim at any hour.

Dress code is enforced at the door. Photography is not allowed inside. Allow forty-five minutes for the church, half a day for the town. The Torre Grossa climb gives the view of the fourteen surviving towers that the town is famous for. The town's Vernaccia, the first Italian wine to receive a protected designation in 1966, is poured in a tasting room in the old fortress a few minutes from the church.