San Miniato Truffle Festival: the White Truffle Fair, Village Festivals and How to Spot a Real Truffle Hunt
On 26 October 1954, in the woods of San Miniato near the village of Balconevisi, a truffle hunter named Arturo Gallerini, known locally as "il Bego", and his dog Parigi dug up a white truffle weighing 2,520 grams. The town still remembers it as the largest ever found. Every November San Miniato celebrates its truffle with the Mostra Mercato Nazionale del Tartufo Bianco, the national white truffle fair. For three weekends the old town fills with stalls, truffle hunters and truffle menus. Here you'll find the 2026 dates, the smaller festivals in the surrounding villages, and some advice on watching a truffle dog at work without paying for a staged show.
A hill town between Florence and Pisa
San Miniato stretches along three hilltops at about 140 metres above sea level, halfway between Florence and Pisa, looking out over the Arno plain. The tower of the Rocca di Federico II rises above the rooftops. Emperor Frederick II made the fortress his seat in Tuscany. It was destroyed during the Second World War and rebuilt soon after.
In Piazza del Duomo, the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and San Genesio still has glazed ceramic bowls, the bacini typical of Tuscan Romanesque, set into its façade. The long painted façade of the Seminario lines Piazza della Repubblica, and the Palazzo Comunale holds frescoed halls. The town also sits on the Via Francigena, the medieval pilgrim road to Rome. Its compact old centre is easy to explore on foot.
The truffle that went to Eisenhower
The 1954 truffle was bought by Giacomo Morra, a merchant from Alba who often came to San Miniato to buy truffles in bulk. It ended up as a gift to US President Dwight Eisenhower. Today a monument in the old town honours Bego and Parigi. A smaller statue of the dog stands in the square of Balconevisi, close to the woods where the truffle was found.
White truffles need loose, calcareous, well-aerated soil and live in symbiosis with trees such as downy oak, poplar, willow and lime. The marl hills around San Miniato give them those conditions. The , the local truffle hunters' association founded in 1982, now brings together hunters from an area covering more than thirty municipalities.
The San Miniato White Truffle Fair 2026
In 2026 the fair reaches its 55th edition and takes over the last three weekends of November: 14–15, 21–22 and 28–29 November. The old town becomes a market spread across its squares and streets, with stalls run by truffle hunters and local producers, food events, and restaurants serving truffle menus. Terre di Pisa, the tourism portal for the Pisa area, has announced a redesigned layout this year and a space dedicated to the towns of the San Miniato hills.
During the fair the old town is closed to private cars, and shuttle buses run up from the car parks below. The programme, shuttle times and pick-up points change from one edition to the next. Check the website before you go. On fair weekends it's worth booking lunch or dinner a few days ahead.
Truffles on the stalls are sold by weight, and the price per gram can change a lot from one season to the next. Always ask which species you're looking at and where it was found.
Truffle festivals from October to March
The season starts before November. In Corazzano, a hamlet of San Miniato, the Fiera Mercato del Tartufo Bianco takes place in early October. The 39th edition ran from 3 to 5 October 2025 at the Circolo ARCI on Via Zara, with truffle dinners, stalls of local produce and truffle-dog demonstrations. Dates for each edition are published on the San Miniato Promozione website.
From late winter into spring it's the turn of the marzuolo, or bianchetto, a pale truffle smaller than the prized white. In Cigoli, the Mostra Mercato del Tartufo Marzuolo runs over two weekends in March and reached its 26th edition in 2026. Corazzano holds its Sagra del Tartufo Marzuolo between late February and early March, with lunches and dinners by reservation.
Truffle seasons in Tuscany
Tuscany's Regional Law 36 of 2023 gives each truffle species its own collection period:
White truffle (Tuber magnatum): 1 October to 15 January
Black winter truffle (Tuber melanosporum): 15 November to 15 March
Bianchetto or marzuolo (Tuber borchii): 15 January to 15 April
Summer truffle or scorzone (Tuber aestivum): 1 June to 31 August, and 1 October to 30 November
In May and September no species can be collected at all. The details are on the . The calendar also works as a filter for tourist offers. In July, for example, nobody can legally collect a white truffle in Tuscany.
Truffle hunting in Tuscany: how to spot the real thing
Search online for "truffle hunting in Tuscany" and you'll get hundreds of offers, from a hunter taking two people across ground they've known all their life to group packages with a half-hour walk and lunch included. Truffles grow underground, out of sight, and the human nose can't pick them up through the soil. Only a dog trained over years can find them, and in Tuscany it's often a lagotto romagnolo.
Some days the dog finds nothing. An operator who has sold a pre-paid experience to a group, though, needs a truffle to turn up. That's where the risk of staging comes in. If the dog always digs at exactly the right moment, in front of everyone, with showtime precision, it's fair to wonder whether the truffle was buried there shortly before you arrived.
Before you book, four questions will tell you a lot about who you're dealing with.
Where do you hunt? A serious truffle hunter works ground they know and have the right to search, and doesn't share it lightly.
How old is the dog, and who trained it? A good truffle dog takes years of work.
What happens if we find nothing? The honest answer is that you pay anyway, because you're paying for the hunter's time, the dog and their know-how.
Which species is in season right now? Someone who really hunts will answer straight away, naming the species and the month its season ends.
An honest outing can end empty-handed after two hours in the woods. That possibility is what makes it believable. If you'd simply like to see truffle hunters and their dogs up close without booking anything, San Miniato's festivals will do. The 2025 programme in Corazzano included truffle-dog demonstrations, and at the November fair you can look at and smell the truffles on the stalls before deciding whether to buy one.
Practical information
Distance from Villa Agnolaccio: about 36 km, 45 minutes by car.
White Truffle Fair 2026: 14–15, 21–22 and 28–29 November, San Miniato old town. Closed to cars, with shuttle buses from the car parks below.
Corazzano white truffle fair: early October.
Marzuolo truffle: Cigoli (March) and Corazzano (late February to early March).
Programmes and times: ; for local truffle hunters, the .
Combine it with: Vinci and the places of Leonardo or the Padule di Fucecchio.
Villa Agnolaccio: your base for the truffle hills
Villa Agnolaccio is about 45 minutes by car from San Miniato, on the hills 3 km from the centre of Pistoia. On fair weekends you can drive up to the old town in the morning, stay for lunch and be back in the afternoon at our early-18th-century villa, among the gardens and the olive grove. From here Florence and Lucca are about an hour away and Vinci around forty minutes. San Miniato can easily be one day of a longer stay in Tuscany.