Traveling IN Tuscany

Jun 29, 2011 109 0 0

Tuscany, Italy

After a while at anchor, we decided it was time for a road trip through Tuscany. We parked Berkeley East and acquired a nifty little Fiat Panda for the journey. The Fiat Panda is a very popular car in Italy, those who aren’t driving Ferraris, seem to be driving Pandas, so we felt very Italian.

We divided the trip into two parts – the area surrounding Sienna, and that of Montalcino. Both are beautiful, but very different. The land around Sienna is green and dramatic, while Montalcino is more pastoral with rolling yellow hillsides. We visited historic towns, toured the countryside, stayed in a castle (in a room larger than our boat), learned to make the local pasta, and of course, sampled the wines of Chianti and Brunello.

From a wine perspective, both Chianti and Brunello are terrific. We love Italian wines. We’d think we would like to make our own wine some day, so we are students of the process, as much as we are consumers of the juice. There are thousands of wineries in this area, it seems like everyone grows grapes and makes wine here, but we only visited a few cellars. Two of them had a big impact on our thoughts and visions of making wine. One was in Chianti, where we met a man whose father had started the winery and now he (the son) is in charge. He was tired, grumpy and looked much older than his 50 years. We were his last visitors of the day and he drank wine while we tasted. He didn’t have much good to say about winemaking, except that it was too much work for too little return. We left wondering if the dream of owning a winery was a good one. We tend to only see the romantic side of the wine world, without truly realizing the work and cost involved (much like people who see cruising the Mediterranean simply as cocktails and sunsets). The second experience was at a winery in the Brunello region where the owner said she could not do an English tour of the winery so we would have to wait for her husband to return. We said we would do it in Italian, we thought it would help our Italian language skills. But when we arrived, she spoke only in English, all the time apologizing for not being able to speak our language better. It turns out that she and her husband bought the property 30 years ago, with the plan to retire and make wine and olive oil. They do most of the work themselves and have received critical acclaim for their wines. She was very proud of their achievement and seemed happy with their retirement business. We were once again inspired. Perhaps we could do that some day, except for the small problem that we didn’t purchase wine property thirty years ago.

What can you say about all of the historic towns and villages in Tuscany? Once you seen one, you’ve seen them all? Not really. We saw Greve, Siena, San Gimignano, Montalcino, Castel Nuovo dell’ Abate, Pienza, and many others. They all really are incredible. And if you look hard enough, and learn enough about the history, they are all very different. Everything that we have ever read about Tuscany was true. We spent days there and hired an English-speaking guide for some time, but we barely scratched the surface, and vowed to return one day to stay for a couple of months to really do justice to the region.

In Siena we climbed the Torre del Mangia, at 330 feet it is the seconded highest medieval tower ever built in Italy. The views were amazing

Siena’s cathedral (Duomo), is one of the great examples of Italian Romanesque-Gothic architecture. Its main façade was completed in 1380. It is unusual for a cathedral in that its axis runs north-south. This is because it was originally intended to be the largest cathedral in the world, After the completion of the transept and the building of the east wall the money ran out and the rest of the cathedral was abandoned.

San Gimignano is a medieval town founded in the 3rd century BC. It has managed to conserve 14 of its towers, while other cities towers were destroyed by war, age and development.