San Miniato White Truffle Fair: the 2026 Mostra Mercato

The 55th edition in 2026

The 2026 fair is the 55th edition of the Mostra Mercato. It runs on three consecutive November weekends: 14-15, 21-22 and 28-29. Each weekend the fair fills San Miniato Alto, the hilltop historic centre, with market stalls, tastings and events centred on Piazza del Popolo and the surrounding old town streets. The fair exists because San Miniato sits at the heart of the Colline Sanminiatesi, one of five denominated white truffle zones recognised under the older regional law, alongside Casentino, Mugello, Val Tiberina and Crete Senesi. The prized white truffle, Tuber magnatum Pico, can legally be searched for and collected in Tuscany from 1 October to 15 January, so the fair weekends fall squarely inside the season. An entry fee for the 2026 fair is not stated in any source we found, so budget for the possibility that stalls and tastings are paid individually rather than through a single ticket.

If you want to understand why the fair happens in autumn at all, the per-species harvest windows are laid out in our guide to truffle season in Tuscany.

The 2026 Tuscan fair weekends side by side

Three fairs divide the Tuscan autumn between them, and their weekends overlap only partly, which means a visitor can in principle attend two of them in one trip. The table below lists the 2026 editions, their host towns and their published weekend dates, as announced by the fair organisers and regional event listings.

Stalls, truffle sellers and tastings

Hunters and traders sell fresh white truffle by weight in the market area, and prices move during the season. In the 2025 season, San Miniato white truffle was quoted around €2,000/kg at the start of autumn and rose to a base of about €3,000/kg by the fair weekends. In the lean 2024 season prices went above €4,000/kg after dry weather roughly halved the harvestable quantity compared with five or six years earlier.

What a fair stall will charge this season is not stated in advance, since the price depends on supply week by week. Our guide to white truffle prices tracks what the market actually paid in recent seasons. Beyond the raw truffle, expect food stalls, restaurants serving truffle menus and tastings through the old town.

The exact programme for each weekend is published by the organisers closer to the dates.

The 1954 record truffle

San Miniato's headline truffle story dates to the night of 26 October 1954, when the hunter Arturo Gallerini and his dog Parigi found a white truffle weighing 2,520 grams near the town. That is 2.52 kg, and it has long been cited as the largest white truffle ever found. The truffle was sent to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the town still tells the story as part of its truffle heritage.

You can see a reproduction of the record truffle at Mu.Tart, San Miniato's own truffle museum on Via IV Novembre 20, which opened in April 2024. The museum is open Saturdays and Sundays from 10:00 to 13:00 and from 15:00 to 18:00, with free admission, which makes it easy to fit into any fair weekend.

A licensed tradition, not a show

Behind the market stalls sits a regulated practice. Truffle hunting in Italy was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021, covering both the hunt and the extraction with the small spade called the vanghetto. In Tuscany every hunter needs a tesserino, a licence obtained after a 30-hour training course and a written exam.

National law requires a trained dog, bans pigs from the search, and only allows digging where the dog has indicated. If you want the full picture of how the dogs work, read our guide to truffle hunting dogs.

The train to San Miniato-Fucecchio

San Miniato's station is called San Miniato-Fucecchio, and it sits in the valley below San Miniato Alto, where the fair is held. From Florence Santa Maria Novella the average journey takes about 43 minutes, with roughly 45 direct trains a day. From Pisa Centrale the trip takes about 27-31 minutes, with roughly 43 direct trains a day.

On fair weekends trains from both cities fill up, so arriving early in the morning is the practical advice.

From the station up to the old town

The last stretch is the part nobody warns you about. The station is in the valley, the fair is on the hilltop, and you cover the difference by local bus or on foot with an uphill walk. There is no cable car and no dedicated fair shuttle named in the sources, so check the bus stop outside the station when you arrive.

For the same reason, any truffle hunt around town that starts at a farm will also leave you to organise your own transport, which is the honest caveat on every listing in our Tuscany truffle hunting comparison.

Journey times at a glance

The table compares the two rail routes to the fair town with the published averages for direct services, based on the timetables aggregated by e656.net. Walking time from the station to the old town is not published as a figure in any source, so it is left out rather than guessed.

What a hunt actually is

Be clear about the product before booking. A truffle hunt is a demonstration in the woods with a licensed hunter and trained dogs, usually 1 to 2 hours of walking, and nobody can promise a find, least of all a white truffle. Most hunts start at a farm in the countryside and include no transport, so a visitor without a car pays for a taxi or books one of the transfer tours.

On the San Miniato listings, the taxi from the train station to the farm costs about €30, arranged by phone.

Hunts near San Miniato

The closest match to the fair is the San Miniato hunt with lunch, a 3-hour experience at $233.88 with a licensed hunter, her dog, and a three-course truffle lunch, capped at 12 travelers. It runs on Francesca's family property, no transport is included, and the listing itself prints two conflicting train timetables from Florence, so confirm the current one before booking and note that all sales are final. A cheaper, shorter option is the San Miniato hunt with truffle tasting at $116.94, which runs 1.5 to 3 hours depending on the dogs and ends with a tasting and wine instead of lunch, with free cancellation up to 24 hours ahead.

If you want someone else to drive, the full-day tour from Florence at $391.75 combines a hunt near San Miniato with lunch and a Chianti wine tasting in a 7-hour minivan day for groups capped at 8.

Booking around the fair weekends

The fair weekends in November are the busiest dates of the Tuscan truffle year, and several listings in our comparison carry a likely-to-sell-out warning. Free-cancellation listings let you hold a place early and release it later. Non-refundable listings on the San Miniato hunts mean a missed train costs you the full price, so build buffer time into the 43-minute rail leg from Florence.

Also plan for the weather: November in inland Tuscany averages highs near 15°C, lows near 7°C and about 5.7 inches of rain across roughly 7 days, which means mud in the woods. Waterproof boots are what the local guides themselves recommend.

The Autumn Fair Calendar at a Glance

The three main Tuscan white truffle fairs and their autumn 2026 weekends, as published by each organiser, so you can line a hunt up with a market day.

San Giovanni d'Asso and the Crete Senesi

San Giovanni d'Asso, in the Crete Senesi near Montalcino, is Tuscany's other major white truffle centre. Its Mostra Mercato del Tartufo Bianco reaches its 40th edition in 2026 and runs on two weekends: 7-8 and 14-15 November. The second of those weekends overlaps with San Miniato's second weekend, so a driver could do both in one trip, though the two towns are far apart.

The village also hosts a truffle museum in the Castello Comunale on Piazza Gramsci 1, but it was reported closed for renovation in recent research, and no reopening date or current admission price is stated. An entry fee for the 2026 fair itself is also not stated.

Volterra and Volterragusto

Volterra and the Alta Val di Cecina form another recognised white-truffle zone in the province of Pisa, and its fair is Volterragusto. The 2026 autumn white-truffle weekends are scheduled for 24-25 October and 31 October to 1 November, running roughly 10:00 to 20:00, which puts Volterra earlier in the season than either San Miniato or San Giovanni d'Asso. Volterra also holds a separate spring fair for the bianchetto or marzuolo truffle on 4-6 April 2026, a different species with a much lower market value.

Programme details are posted on the organisers' site, reachable at [email protected]. Note that Volterra is harder to reach by public transport than San Miniato, since the recommended route from Florence runs via Poggibonsi and takes roughly two hours.

Choosing between the fairs

The honest differences are these. San Miniato is the easiest to reach by train from Florence or Pisa and has the deepest truffle identity, from the 1954 record to its own museum. San Giovanni d'Asso has the Crete Senesi landscape and the shorter, quieter fair, but the museum is closed and public transport is thin.

Volterra starts the season earliest, which matters if your trip falls in late October rather than November. If you are building a hunt around any of them, our comparison of truffle hunts in Tuscany lists the bookable options for each area with their real meeting points and transport gaps.