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Sample refined cooking in a 15th-century palazzo. Sample, too, the enormous wine cellar, which ranges from little-known local labels to grand foreign wines.

Get great home-made gelato and decent coffee on San Gimignano’s main street.

The Etruscans crafted crystal in this area. Belli is the best of those workshops carrying on the tradition, producing both refined objects and souvenirs.

Santa Verdiana is Tuscany’s loveliest and most successful Baroque church. Its interior is swathed in frescoes celebrating the odd life of Verdiana, who walled herself into a cell here for 34 years with two snakes, which God sent to test her.

Charming little brick town. Benozzo Gozzoli teamed with Giusto di Andrea on the Giustiziati tabernacle in Santi Michele e Jacopo church. Also inside, a 1503 bust and 1954 tombstone commemorate Decameron author Boccaccio (1313–75), who may have been born here; the Casa del Boccaccio, in which he passed his final years, is now a small museum and study library.

Enter from the west to pass under Baccio d’Agnolo’s Mannerist Palazzo Campana gate (1539). The Duomo features a Giambologna/Pietro Tacca bronze crucifix and, in Mino da Fiesole’s tabernacle, a nail said to be from Christ’s cross. Palazzo Pretorio’s archaeological museum is most interesting for the 1920s political graffiti scrawled on this former prison’s inner walls by imprisoned Communists. The (intentionally) sgraffito-covered façade of Palazzo dei Priori hides a small museum of Sienese paintings.

This locals’ restaurant sticks to its guns: Volterran dishes made only with ingredients available at market that day.

Crisp tablecloths and crisp service are coupled with fascinating menus explaining the medieval or Etruscan origins of each finely prepared dish.

Piazza Farinata degli Uberti is ringed by 12th- and 13th-century palaces and the Romanesque Sant’Andrea church. Collegiata di Sant’Andrea museum contains a Masolino Pietà (1425) and a 1447 font carved by Bernardo Rossellino. Masolino shows up again at Santo Stefano with a large Madonna and Child fresco; Rossellino with an Annunciation .

This retail outlet for Luciano Bruni’s Vernaccia wine also sells olive oils and other top wines from across Tuscany.