Museum of Sacred Art

The Museum of Sacred Art in San Gimignano displays works from the 13th to 19th centuries, including paintings, sculptures, and liturgical furnishings.

Planning your visit

San Gimignano's towers are the reason most people come — fourteen survive of the seventy-odd that noble families built as fortified status symbols, giving the town a skyline unlike anywhere else in Tuscany.

The Museum of Sacred Art sits beside the Collegiata and holds works from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries: panel paintings, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, textiles and liturgical silver drawn from the town's churches.

The Collegiata itself, entered separately, is the more spectacular experience — its interior is covered floor to ceiling in fourteenth-century frescoes, Old Testament scenes on one wall and New Testament opposite, with a Last Judgement over the entrance that is unusually graphic about the punishments.

San Gimignano is extremely crowded by day and considerably better in the early morning or evening.

Allow forty-five minutes for the museum. Bookable options include combined cathedral and museum tickets. Current availability is listed below.