Tuscany - Italy - page 159

include relics and tapestries from the piazza's monuments, as well as trophies
brought back from the Crusades. The building also has a good “poor man's” view
of the piazza from its upper balcony.
THE OTHER PISA
Ancient Italy may have been obsessed with art and architecture, but as anyone
who's driven its highways knows, modern Italians are obsessed with speed. That
yen for everything shiny, metallic, and turbo-charged is on display at Museo
Piaggo (Viale Rinaldo Piaggo, 7, Pontedera; % 0587-27171; www.museopiaggio.
it; free admission; Wed-Sat 10am-6pm). Here you have a factory museum that
tells the story of Rinaldo Piaggio, who launched his engineering business in 1888,
at the age of 20, and soon rose to the forefront of Italian industry, going from ship
fittings to railway cars and steam ships, and finally in 1941 to that most-Italian
form of transportation, the Vespa. (Be sure to check out the Vespa Alpha designed
for a 1960s spy movie. In the film at least, it could be converted into a submarine
and a helicopter, which are pretty good dealer options for a scooter.) Along with
the many Vespe, there's an impressive collection of Gilera motorcycles and Piaggo
ships and planes.
SAN GIMIGNANO
San Gimignano once had a skyline that boasted over 70 towers, with competing
business, military, and family interests controlling trade routes through the
Tuscan plains. Only 14 towers remain, but they still give this small town a unique
and ancient urban character.
You can easily cover the city in a day trip from Florence or Siena. And since so
many tourists do so, San Gimignano has become perhaps Tuscany's greatest
tourist trap—each day hundreds of visitors are stuck for hours within the town
walls waiting for the call back to their bus in a remote parking lot. The church has
an electric turnstile for reading tickets, the main square hosts a tasteless torture
museum, and streets are jammed with shops filled with every mass-produced trin-
ket imaginable.
And yet San Gimignano keeps some of its 1,000-year-old character despite the
tourist influx (especially for those who overnight here and see the city without its
throngs of visitors). Many family-run restaurants in town serve traditional Tuscan
specialties with San Gimignano-area wines. The summit of Torre Grossa offers
views of Tuscan farmlands unchanged for centuries. The less-touristed
Sant'Agostino allows visitors to examine its frescoes without a prepaid ticket. And
old men still assemble in the shade of the arches of Piazza del Duomo to have
their breakfast and share their opinions on the state of the world.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SAN GIMIGNANO
San Gimignano takes its name from the bishop who is said to have saved the town
from Attila the Hun in the 5th century by clever diplomacy. By the 10th century,
San Gimignano (the town) consisted of a fortified castle surrounded by a small
village. It wasn't until the 12th and 13th centuries that the towers and town walls
began to appear in great height and quantity.