Siena travel guide, in your ear
A perfectly preserved medieval city, the Piazza del Campo, the Palio horse race, the striped Duomo, and the rival contrade that have divided the city into neighbourhoods for 700 years.
- 20 narrated stops
- ~1 hour of stories
- 6 languages
- Offline ready
What is the Gingerguide Siena tour?
It is a self-guided audio walking tour of Siena, Italy, inside the Gingerguide travel guide app. The tour maps 20 sights and tells the story of each one in a two to three minute narration with a lifelike AI voice. When the story is not enough, ask the built-in AI guide about the place and keep the conversation going. Everything is available in six languages and works fully offline after a one-time download.
About Siena
Siena is a city that peaked seven hundred years ago and then, in a sense, stopped. Most old towns are a pile of centuries; Siena is one moment held still, a complete medieval city almost as it was in the fourteenth century. How it froze like this is the whole story, and not a happy one.
In the early 1300s Siena was one of the richest cities in Europe, a banking and wool power run by a council of nine merchants, locked in rivalry with Florence. With that money it built the great curved Campo and a cathedral so ambitious the city voted to double it into one of the largest churches in Christendom. Then, in 1348, the Black Death killed perhaps half of Siena. The building stopped, the money drained to Florence, the cathedral was never finished. Robbed of its future, Siena kept its past instead.
The frozen city is no museum: the Sienese never stopped being fiercely local. The old town is split into seventeen contrade, districts you are born into, each with its own colours and mortal rivals. Twice each summer they erupt into the Palio, a bareback horse race around the Campo that grown adults weep and scheme over. Even on an ordinary day the flags hang over the streets, and people tell you their contrada before their name.
The set-pieces are staggering. The cathedral is a zebra-striped mountain of marble, its floor a carpet of inlaid pictures that took three centuries to make, shown only weeks a year. Beside it a single giant wall stands open to the sky, the Facciatone, the front of the vast cathedral the plague cancelled, now the city's best viewpoint. And the town hall keeps a seven-hundred-year-old fresco of good and bad government, painted to remind the nine rulers what was at stake.
Climb the Facciatone at the end of the day and look over the red-brick city, the town-hall tower, the striped cathedral, the vineyards and cypress beyond. Siena lost its war with Florence and its future to the plague, and in losing became one of the best-preserved medieval cities in Europe. Some of the best things, it turns out, are the ones that never got to change.
One day in Siena
A simple way to walk the highlights, following the route order in the app. Swap anything; Siena rewards detours.
What to see in Siena: all 20 stops
Every place below has its own narrated story in the app, and its own answers when you want more. Walk them in any order; the map shows what is around you.
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Piazza del Campo
UNESCO-listed Piazza del Campo is one of Europe's greatest medieval squares, a shell-shaped brick piazza divided into nine sections representing Siena's Council of Nine, sloping gently toward the magnificent Gothic Palazzo Pubblico.
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Palio di Siena
Held on 2 July and 16 August since 1633, the Palio is a bareback horse race around Piazza del Campo in which ten of Siena's seventeen contrade (city districts) compete, a ninety-second race that embodies seven centuries of civic identity, rivalry, and passion.
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Torre del Mangia
Soaring nearly 88 metres above the Piazza del Campo, the Torre del Mangia (1338–1348) is one of the tallest medieval secular towers in Italy, its 503 steps lead to a panoramic summit commanding all of Siena and the Tuscan hills beyond.
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Palazzo Pubblico & Civic Museum
Siena's Gothic town hall (begun 1297) houses the Civic Museum containing Simone Martini's sublime Maestà (1315) and Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338–39), perhaps the most important secular fresco cycle in medieval European art.
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Siena Cathedral (Duomo)
A masterpiece of Italian Gothic-Romanesque architecture, Siena Cathedral is famous for its alternating black and white marble stripes, Nicola Pisano's sculpted pulpit (1265-68), and its extraordinary floor of 56 inlaid marble panels depicting scenes from history and myth.
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Piccolomini Library
Accessed from the Cathedral's left nave, the Piccolomini Library (1502–07) contains ten brilliantly preserved frescoes by Pinturicchio depicting the life of Pope Pius II, among the finest examples of Renaissance fresco painting in Tuscany.
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Baptistery of San Giovanni
Below the Cathedral apse, the Baptistery of San Giovanni (begun 1316) houses an extraordinary baptismal font, a collaborative masterpiece by Jacopo della Quercia, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Donatello, representing the highest achievement of early 15th-century Italian sculpture.
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Santa Maria della Scala
One of Europe's oldest hospitals, operating from the 9th century until 1995, now a vast museum complex, its Pilgrim Hall (Sala del Pellegrinaio) contains remarkable 15th-century frescoes depicting hospital life with extraordinary documentary realism.
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Pinacoteca Nazionale
The National Picture Gallery in Palazzo Buonsignori houses the world's most complete collection of the Sienese school, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers, tracing the development of one of medieval Europe's greatest artistic traditions.
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Contrade of Siena
Siena's 17 contrade (city districts), each with its own church, museum, fountain, symbol, and fierce civic identity, form a living medieval social structure in which every Sienese citizen is baptized at birth and belongs for life.
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Museo dell'Opera del Duomo
Housed in the unfinished nave of the never-completed great Cathedral expansion, the Opera del Duomo museum safeguards Duccio's monumental Maestà (1308–11), one of the defining works of Italian medieval painting, along with sculptures by Giovanni Pisano.
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Via di Città & Banchi di Sopra
The great curved spine of Siena's historic centre, Via di Città and Banchi di Sopra form the main corso of the medieval city, lined with Gothic and Renaissance palaces including the Palazzo Chigi-Saracini and linking Piazza del Campo to the northern terzo.
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Basilica di San Domenico
The great Gothic brick basilica of the Dominicans in Siena (begun 1226) is the spiritual home of St Catherine of Siena, housing her head (as a relic) in the Cappella di Santa Caterina, along with Sodoma's finest paintings and a chapel containing her cell.
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Fontebranda
The Fontebranda (c.1246) is Siena's largest and most historic public fountain, a magnificent Gothic structure of three brick arches reflected in a pool below, mentioned by Dante in the Inferno and the neighbourhood fountain of St Catherine of Siena.
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Piazza Salimbeni
Piazza Salimbeni is one of the most perfectly preserved medieval piazzas in Italy, three palaces from three different centuries (Gothic, Renaissance, Mannerist) enclosing a harmonious square that has been the headquarters of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena bank since 1472.
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Oratorio di San Bernardino
Adjacent to the Basilica di San Francesco, the small two-story Oratorio di San Bernardino contains one of the finest concentrations of early 16th-century Sienese fresco painting, works by Sodoma, Beccafumi, and Girolamo del Pacchia in an intimate chapel space.
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Fortezza Medicea & Enoteca Italiana
The Fortezza Medicea is the imposing 16th-century Medici fortress at the northern edge of Siena, now transformed into a public park and home to the Enoteca Italiana, a permanent wine exhibition and tasting venue showcasing bottles from across Italy.
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Via Francigena through Siena
Siena was a major staging post on the Via Francigena, the great medieval pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome, and the city's history, hospitals, and urban form were shaped by the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who passed through its gates every century.
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Sienese Cuisine & Traditions
Siena's culinary traditions reflect its medieval mercantile culture and Tuscan agricultural heritage, from the iconic panforte (spiced fruit-and-nut cake) and ricciarelli (almond cookies) to pici pasta, wild boar, pecorino cheese, and the wines of the surrounding countryside.
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Sienese Gothic Architecture & Medieval Skyline
Siena's historic centre is a perfectly preserved medieval city of red brick, Gothic palaces, private towers, and terracotta rooftops, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose skyline has barely changed since the 14th century and represents one of the finest surviving examples of medieval Italian urban design.
Three things most visitors miss
Piazza del Campo
The nine sections of Piazza del Campo's brick paving are a permanent political monument, each one commemorates one member of the Council of Nine (Governo dei Nove), the oligarchic government that ruled Siena at the height of its power from 1287 to 1355.
Palio di Siena
A horse without its rider can win the Palio, if the riderless horse (called a 'scosso') crosses the finish line first with its head-covering (the 'spennacchiera') still attached, the contrada wins. This has happened many times in the race's history.
Torre del Mangia
The Torre del Mangia was deliberately designed to be the same height as the Cathedral bell tower, expressing in architecture the Sienese Republic's political philosophy that secular civic power should stand equal to ecclesiastical authority.
Siena tour: questions and answers
Do I need a tour guide in Siena?
Not a human one. Gingerguide covers Siena with 20 narrated sights, so you get the stories a guide would tell, at your own pace and on your own route. And if a story leaves you with a question, you can ask the built-in AI guide and discuss the place right there, the way you would with a guide.
How many stops does the Siena audio tour have?
The Siena guide covers 20 sights. Each one has a researched story of roughly three minutes, about 1 hour of listening in total. You choose the order and the pace; the tour is self-guided.
Does the Siena tour work offline?
Yes. You can download Siena in the app, audio, photos, and offline map tiles included. After the download, the full tour works without an internet connection.
Which languages does the Siena guide support?
Every Siena narration is available in English, Spanish, French, German, Turkish, and Chinese. You can switch the language in the app at any time.
Is the Siena audio guide free?
The Gingerguide app is free to download, and Siena includes a free preview: you can see all 20 sights on the map at no cost. A premium subscription unlocks the full stories, audio narration, and the offline download.
Hear Siena tell its own story.
Preview all 20 Siena stops free in the Gingerguide app.