Siena; Monday, 29 September, 2014

I decided to abandon the hotel breakfast and instead had a significantly better breakfast at one of the cafes on the Campo before heading up the hill to the bus station to head out of town for the day.

The town of San Gimignano is a remarkable Tuscan hill town. Not just for the excellent wine that it produces, but also for it’s crazy skyline.

During the middle ages a craze for tower building broke out across the city with more and more increasingly larger towers being built in what is quite a small walled town centre.

Over time some of the towers have been demolished and the general heights have been reduced, but there’s still enough towers to create a very weird view as the bus approaches up from the valley below.

I had a long wander around the town centre before stopping for lunch in a nice restaurant just away from the central square.

The town is quite small, and today is a bit of a tourist trap, with many day tours from Florence doing San Gimignano as a late afternoon stop on the way back from a day in Siena, so with the numbers of raised umbrellas, flowers and other implements to indicate different groups suddenly shooting up I decided to head back to the bus stop and return to Siena.

Back in Siena with about an hour of daylight left I had a pleasant pre-dinner drink on the Campo before heading down slightly behind the Palazzo Publico to an amazing little restaurant down on the market square for the best meal of the trip.

Sated, and staggering slightly under the weight of food it was back to the hotel to allow the digestion process some time.