The Canada of Italy, Part II

So a quick note before returning to San Gimignano - It rained all day yesterday. The rain let up in the afternoon so I went for a walk. The apartment is small and I had a little bit of cabin fever. I was expecting it to be quiet and no one around, it being Easter and all. I couldn’t believe how many people were out! And in the city center, about 60% of the shops were open. It was a change from Okemos. Today is a holiday in Italy - Easter Monday - but I have a feeling that all of the shops are going to be open and it’ll be business as usual where we are.

OK - back to the pictures!

After we came down off the fortress, we “wandered” around the city streets for a bit. OK, OK. I was lost and couldn’t figure out where we were. But that’s OK. We saw some fun stuff.

One of the thing that I noticed about San Gimignano was that the sidewalks were clean! We saw people walking dogs, but there weren’t the landmines that we always see in Florence. I figured out why:

There were boxes all over the city with bags to remind people to clean up their dogs’ crap. Definitely a plus for San Gimignano.

This was another exciting sight that we wanted to see:

I’ll let you decide which one we were going to go and look for. (Hint - it’s the only one in English.) We head to the left down a street that is definitely not one that caters to the casual tourist. We must have walked for a kilometer when we got to the city walls. Not only did we not find WineLand, but I don’t think that we saw ANY of the things listed on the sign. This shouldn’t have surprised us though. The green sign at the bottom translates as “All Directions”. I just don’t get it.

Our luck with wine was not very good on this trip. We were also interested in this one:

The Vernaccia Museum!! (Sign on the bottom.) Vernaccia is a grape that is grown in the San Gimignano region. (Jim tells me that it is the second most widely planted wine grape planted in Tuscany.) It makes a great white wine. We had sampled a couple of bottles before visiting San Gimignano. The sign is so cool! It has grapes in a little temple and everything. This is going to be great!!

Signs in San Gimignano suck. They led us back up to the area with the fortress. We kept walking, and then saw another sign for the museum, pointing us back in the direction in which we came. This happened three times total. A very nice guy with wild, curly hair pointed us in the general direction too. No luck. We gave up and decided to get some lunch.

Just a note here - The only map I had at this point was the one in the tour book. Half of the streets didn’t have names on that map. Not that it really mattered, because the only street names that we posted were for streets that didn’t have names on the map. If a name was given on the map, I couldn’t find it anywhere in real life. As I said, San Gimignano is the Canada of Italy.

We ate lunch outside in the northern part of town, outside of the Church of San Agostino. Very quiet, good pizza. I just took the time to biosynthesize some Vitamin D:

Jim took the chance to ruin my photo: (Enhance he says. )

He he.

You’ve heard me talk about construction here in Italy. Lots of scaffolding goes up, but as far as we can see, work only gets done maybe one day a month. Well, while in San Gimignano, we actually saw some people working.

I know, this is a bad photo, but the woman (blob in black on right) moved before I could take the picture. She was just as amazed as I was. She watched the people on the left working for about ten minutes. This next guy got up close to see what was going on:

** WARNING ** This part has nothing to do with San Gimignano. The building next door to our apartment is being renovated. We’ll see them doing stuff every once in awhile, but for the most part, I think they use the area where they store the bricks for their personal parking spot. Not on the Saturday before Easter. At 7:30AM on Saturday, they started jack hammering. We finally left the apartment to get away from the noise around 10AM and get some grocery shopping done. We came back to the apartment at about 10:30AM and they were done. Why us? ** BACK TO SAN GIMIGNANO **

The streets up in this part of the city were much less touristy. We sat during lunch and watched the people going about their lives:

After lunch, we were heading back down to the bus stop and came across this:

Another sign for the Museum! Before starting the chase, we decided to visit the Duomo or San Gimignano and get the free map from the tourism center. No photos allowed in the cathedral/duomo, but it was over the top. Every inch of the walls were covered with gaudy and not very good frescos.

Refreshed and armed with our visit to the tourism center, we set off for the Wine Museum. And found it.

It was closed. Not just for the day, but closed for good. We had a good laugh/cry. After than disappointment, we decided to get the heck out of town. We bought some Vernaccia (the wine, not the grapes) from a local wine shop. The proprietor only spoke Italian but we understood most of what he was telling us.

So my verdict? Cute town, lots of touristy stuff, worth the price of a bus ticket in March but I don’t think I would want to go when there are more people there. We learned a few life lessons while there - if a sight doesn’t have the entry price listed on the door and you have to go in to find out the cost, it’s going to be expensive and probably not worth it. The other lesson? The bus doesn’t pick you up where it lets you off. (Just so you know if you are every going to visit, the bus stop is over to the left as you are facing the city walls. There is a bus shelter there.)

Last Tuesday (18th of March) we went to Ferrara to visit Jim’s collaborator and set stuff up for him to visit in May. I’ll be posting photos soon!

~ by chemistryandwine on March 24, 2008.