Poggibonsi was two hours between trains. We knew nothing about it. We got off at the station, looked at the map, saw a hill, and went up.
That is, increasingly, how the best mornings happen.
The reconstructed Iron Age village at the top of the hill. We had no idea this existed. Nobody told us to come here. This is exactly why we do it like this.
The village
At the top of the Rocca hill, behind the fortress walls, someone is building a village. Not restoring one — building one, from scratch, using the techniques and materials of the Iron Age. Sharpened wooden stakes driven into the earth for the palisade. Wattle-and-daub walls going up section by section. Thatched roundhouses at different stages of construction, some open to walk into, their interiors fitted out with clay hearths and wooden ladders and loom frames and hanging herbs and all the small objects of a life that stopped two thousand years ago and is being painstakingly reassembled.
We walked through it in February, largely alone, while the work was still visibly in progress. In a year — maybe two — this is going to be something people make a specific journey for. Right now it belongs to the people who stumble across it.
The entrance to the Iron Age village. The stakes, the mud, the roundhouse frame behind. Completely serious archaeology, completely open to wander through.
The longhouse. Raised on stilts, wattle-and-daub walls, thatched roof. The ladder is the front door.
Inside the roundhouse. Central hearth. Sleeping loft above. The clay walls have been whitewashed. It smells of old wood and straw.
Bronze figure on the hillside above the village. Birds perched on the arms, the torso, the shoulders. The palisade stakes in the background. Someone has thought carefully about what goes here.
The Rocca
The fortress above the village is the reason the hill exists as a significant place at all. Lorenzo de’ Medici had plans for it — a fortified town, ambitious enough to have its own name, Poggio Imperiale. The project was abandoned when the Florentines took the territory and the town below settled into being what it became: a place people pass through on the way to somewhere else.
What remains is extraordinary. The outer walls, the towers, the long vaulted tunnel that runs through the heart of the structure — brick-arched, lit from the far end where a silhouetted figure stands in the light like something from a painting. We walked the full circuit of the ramparts. The views over the valley are the kind that make you understand immediately why someone chose this particular hill.
The vaulted passage through the fortress. Fifteenth century. Lit from one end. The figure at the far end is real.
Through a gap in the fortress walls, looking down at Poggibonsi and the valley beyond. Cypress lines and hills as far as the light reaches.
Inside the Rocca, in a small chamber off the main passage, someone has placed an art installation: a small grey ceramic child, seated, holding two glass light-bulb forms that glow faintly in the dark. Hanging bulbs behind it. The chamber is barely lit. It is one of those things you don’t expect and can’t quite explain afterwards, and it sits in the memory longer than most of the things you went looking for.
A chamber inside the Rocca. The installation — ceramic child, glass lights, near darkness — was not on any sign we saw. You just find it.
The monastery
Halfway up the hill, before the fortress, a cobbled courtyard leads to a Romanesque church. The exterior is plain enough — stone, cypresses, cars parked to one side. The interior is not plain at all. The apse is entirely painted: deep blue vaulted ceiling with gold stars, narrative frescoes floor to ceiling, the figures in terracotta and ochre and that specific medieval green that no one has quite managed to replicate since. A small stall near the entrance sold rosemary bead bracelets — donations for the upkeep of the building. Sarah bought one. The right transaction in the right place.
The monastery church of San Lucchese, halfway up the hill. Cobbles, cypresses, plain stone. You have to go in.
Inside San Lucchese. Sarah at the iron gate to the chancel, the frescoed apse lit behind her. The camera caught the light better than we expected.
The apse ceiling. Blue vault with gold stars, narrative paintings on every wall. Fourteenth century. No queue. No entrance fee.
The Fonti
Down the hill from the fortress, in a hollow of green lawn, there are the medieval water sources — the Fonti di Poggibonsi. A long stone channel carries water across the grass toward a structure that stops you in your tracks: six Gothic pointed arches cut into a retaining wall, the stone blackened with age, the floor inside flooded to an inch of still dark water, moss thick across every surface. It was built in the thirteenth century. It looks like it was built in a dream.
We peered into the arched niches. In one of them, on small stone plinths just above the waterline, a row of stone crocodiles. Six or seven of them, mossy and serene, arranged as if resting after a long journey. No explanation anywhere. No sign. Just crocodiles, in a thirteenth-century Gothic water cistern, in a Tuscan hillside town that most people travel through without stopping.
This is what we mean when we say the site is not a travel blog. A travel blog would have explained the crocodiles. We have no explanation. We just stood there and looked at them.
The Fonti di Poggibonsi. Thirteenth century. Six Gothic arches, flooded floor, moss on everything. It appears without warning at the bottom of the hill.
Inside one of the arched niches. Stone crocodiles on plinths above the waterline. We have no idea why they are here. Neither, apparently, did anyone else.
The water channel leading to the Fonti. The arched niches in the wall behind. The whole complex sits in the park below the fortress.
The olive grove
Between the fortress and the monastery, the path runs along a terrace wall above an olive grove. The trees are old — properly old, the trunks split and hollowed and silver-grey in the February light — and the valley opens out below them across to the hills on the other side. We stopped here twice. There was no particular reason. Sometimes a place just asks you to stop.
The olive grove below the fortress walls. Ancient trees. The valley behind. We stopped here twice.
We got the bus. We did not tell anyone in San Gimignano what we’d just spent the morning doing. We weren’t sure they’d believe us.
Poggibonsi, Tuscany – 4.83 miles – 2hrs 04m – 563ft – 11,192 Steps
