+39 347 1464195
Our Licensed Tour Guides will led you to discover one of the most charming and picturesque medieval villages of Tuscany: Certaldo.
This video, with its aerial images, makes even more tangible the beauty of this city, its monuments and the beautiful landscape that surrounds it, a corner of Tuscany absolutely to find out! A flight over more than a thousand years of history that will make even more attractive your guided tour lead by our Tour Guides.
Home of the writer Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the Decameron, Certaldo is located 12 km from San Gimignano, on the border between the provinces of Siena and Florence, along the ancient Via Francigena.
Far from the frenetic pace of mass tourism, Certaldo Alta maintains the charm of the medieval village, with houses and buildings in brick dating from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The guided tour touches the palaces and the most important churches of the village: the House of Giovanni Boccaccio; the Church of Santi Jacopo e Filippo (XIII century, where Giovanni Boccaccio was buried); the adjacent Sacred Art Museum (with paintings, sculptures and jewelery from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century), the Palazzo Pretorio, former fortress of the Counts Alberti (1192) and home of the Vicars of the city of Florence (XIII-XVIII) where people can admire the Tabernacle of Giustiziati (where those condemned to death prayed before being killed), a masterpiece frescoed around 1460 by Benozzo Gozzoli, the favorite painter of Medici Family.
To the visit of Certaldo you can combine a guided tour of Florence, Siena, San Gimignano and Pisa. The leitmotif of each itinerary is clearly Giovanni Boccaccio.
The city centre of Florence with its monuments, his ancient streets and squares will reveal to you its medieval past.
Siena, a pearl among the Tuscan medieval cities, gives you the possibility to visit the local State Archive where the original will of the great storyteller is kept.
In Pisa, inside the Monumental Cemetery, situade in the “Piazza dei Miracoli”, you can admire the fresco painting “The Triumph of Death”, by Buonamico Buffalmacco, depicting the lifelike atmosphere of that time. Buonamico Buffalmacco is not only the painter of this masterpiece but one of the main characters of some of the most lively novellas of the Decameron.
San Gimignano, the town of the ancient towers, is mentioned many times by Boccaccio – as well as by Dante – for the quality of its wines. Among them, the Vernaccia still plays a leading role. Its first mention dates to the 1276 and since then it still grows in this unique place, which contains all the smell and flavour of its “terroir”.
At the Palazzo Giannozzi and the old Convent of Saint Augustin, very beautiful locations recently restored, it will be possible to participate in educational activities and thematic workshops, projects designed for schools so that students can learn while having fun but also for adults so that they can spend the vacation of their dreams in a fabulous place, in contact with nature and ancient traditions.
The visit of Certaldo can be combined to the guided tour of San Gimignano, Colle di Val d’Elsa, Poggibonsi, Monteriggioni, San Vivaldo, San Galgano Abbey, San Miniato al Tedesco.