I get it. Every region needs industry. There’s always some big factory with smokestacks mucking up the skyline, to say nothing of the air quality. There are used car lots, dingy repair shops and grotesque apartment blocks. This is real life. It can’t all be vineyards and stone farmhouses.

But on a perfect day in Tuscany, to hell with reality.

So thank you, towns like Poggibonsi, for taking one for the team. Without your concentration of malls and warehouses, towns like San Gimignano may not have been able to endure in a pristine bubble.

Thank you also to the rolling hills of Tuscany, without which you may have the unfortunate occasion to see Poggibonsi while strolling the idyllic paths around San Gimignano.

There are so many others who made this perfect day possible. Let’s see, I don’t want to forget anyone. Oh yes, thank you impossibly sparce train and bus connections. If you had been more convenient or comfortable some of the hordes may have followed us from Florence. You really know how to strand a tourist in the middle of nowhere (or Poggibonsi, same difference).

Thank you unseasonably warm temperatures. Thank you thin crust pizza.  Thank you UNESCO, you’ve nailed it again. Thank you, darling husband, for loving Italy so much that we seem to end up here every two years. I know that’s a big compromise from every day.

And of course I can’t forget the city of San Gimignano itself, the quintessential Tuscan hill town. Thank you for demolishing only 58 of your original 72 towers. I know they were not in keeping with Florentine Renaissance style. It must have been hard to keep the overbearing Medici from tearing them down. And thank you for looking so much like Rapunzel’s tower. That bought us at least 15 minutes of priceless three year old attention span.

Thank you.