San Gimignano

A lot of churches are starting to look the same at this point. Siena also has a domed cathedral, but you have to pay to go in and look around. Our new tactic is “learning for free” (tried to find a Simpsons clip everywhere for this, but no luck), where you stick your head through the door and absorb as much as you can without physically entering the building, thus avoiding entrance fees.

After Siena’s dome, we headed to San Gimignano for the day. We got over eager about finding a good parking spot and stopped too soon in the wrong town. Luckily they had a map posted outside the parking lot so we realized we were in the wrong place and got back in the car. Five minutes later, San Gimignano!

The town is another walled city that's atop a hill, with 14 medieval towers still standing. The town centre is a Unesco World Heritage Site. Overall, San Gimignano wasn’t our favourite, the low point being having to pay 50 cents each to pee in a non-gender specific bathroom. It wasn’t pretty. Definitely not 50 cents pretty. We bought tickets to tour the town’s main church Collegiata and museum, and they were really overpriced. Maybe we’re just spoiled now after the Vatican. No Michelangelo’s? Pfffft. There was also a “wine museum”, which consisted of one room with a video playing on wine-making. In Italian only. But plenty of space to pay for wine tastings. We did have some excellent grapefruit and melon gelati though.

Since we still had a decent amount of time before dinner, we decided to drive to Montevarchi. Kevin read that they had a Prada outlet. Determined to get an Italian purse, I set out on my mission. Driving there was pretty precarious on winding roads and then we couldn’t even find the outlet! Signs seemed to indicate it was outside Montevarchi, back towards where we came from. Kevin’s not big on purse shopping, so we called it a day.

Back in Siena, we stopped at a little grocery store and bought some fruit and drinks. Drinks being a beer for Kevin and a mini bottle of prosecco for me. With drinks in hand, we set off to the laundromat.

The day ended with spaghetti and clams #3.