After a morning run taking us back by the Duomo, we had breakfast downstairs and went back up to the room to get ready. I was in the bathroom when Brandi was having trouble getting her hair dryer to work. We have a converter for it to fit into the European plugs, but it tends to operate with very little power for some reason. She was looking for a new place to plug it in to, when POP! There was a loud crack and all of the lights went out. When I went to Radio Shack to pick up a plug converter, the guy there actually sold me two, one adapter that is for appliances that are already at the right voltage, and a converter primarily for heated appliances like the hair dryer. When the converter wasn’t giving her the results she wanted, she decided to give the adapter a try. You see, Brandi has a philosophy that if she doesn’t have enough electricity to dry her hair, then nobody in the hotel should have enough electricity to do anything. It was really just our room that lost power, Daniel is just being double-headed two-horned jackass with a smelly butt.
Each of us had one thing that we had not yet gotten to eat while in Italy, so for our last lunch we decided to seek out a good restaurant for pasta alla carbonara (Daniel) and gnocchi alla Bolognese (Brandi). After some shopping in the rain, we went south of the Arno to Celestino’s, a restaurant recommended by our hotel. It was a perfect last lunch. We arrived right at noon, so we were the only ones there for a little while. I had spaghetti alla carbonara, which has bacon and egg yolks. Alla carbonara and alla matriciana are two pasta preparations you don’t see as often in the states. I think I prefer alla matriciana, but alla carbonara was definitely interesting and worth trying. The restaurant was great and their gnocchi was unbelievable! It was hearty and delicious, well-worth the traipse through the rain to get there.
The one thing Brandi requested for this trip was a wine tour in Tuscany. We spent the whole trip thinking that the tour listed for today (which included Pisa and Lucca and was slated for a full day) was going to have the winery tour. When I called the bus company today to see what the tour included, the lady said that it was just Pisa and Lucca with lunch in between. Not only that, but she told us it was canceled due to lack of interest (punctuated with another “Didn’t you get the fax?”). Luckily, when I mentioned that we’d rather sign up for a Tuscany tour that included a winery, the tour company happened to have exactly what we wanted.
We walked to the bus stop under a light but consistent rain---definitely not the best weather for visiting a winery. The bus took us along a similar route to the one we took to Siena, through windy, hilly roads and around some really tight corners. Once we got within a few kilometers of the winery, all you could see was vineyards on one side of the bus and olive trees on the other.
The winery is housed in a medieval castle that figured prominently in some of the Renaissance tug-of-war between Florence and Siena, and it’s about the most beautiful place we’ve ever seen. It looks very, uh, castle-y, with those little cutouts at the top of the walls (not sure what they’re called), as well as Spanish-style roofs and an amazing view out of the back. As if on cue, the rain cleared up and the clouds went away just as we were leaving so we could enjoy the view in all its glory. We walked inside and got to see the barrels that they use to age the wine, and then we got to see the wine cellar, an amazing collection of the winery’s production that includes bottles going all the way back to 1911.
We got to sample some of their wines (a chianti, a chianti reserva, and a dessert wine), plus some nice cheese and bruschetta. Then it was on to Greve in Chianti, a nice little town where we visited a butcher shop with very, very fresh prosciutto. They had these legs hanging in the window, and I don’t want to get too graphic, but I’ll just say that you could see the hoof. And some little hairs right by the hoof. Daniel is being polite; those legs were everywhere in the shop, so much so that he actually had to duck. I’m not a huge fan of meat on the bone (too graphically carnivorous for me), but I love prosciutto, and it ruined the mystique of not knowing exactly what part of the pig it comes from.
We spent just a few minutes at Pieve di San Leolino, a hillside village that has a 12th century church another spectacular view. We had dinner at Trattoria da Pordo on Via Valigondoli (which seemed like a country house on the side of a solitary mountain that we walked part of the way down to get to dinner) and we sat by Chris and Natalie, a couple from Richmond, Virginia, who were also on their first anniversary trip. We had talked with them throughout the bus rides all afternoon. It was great getting to know them---we haven’t gotten much of a chance to socialize with the people on our tours, and we really enjoyed getting to spend time with a couple our age. Interestingly, another table had a couple that was getting married the following day. The other people at the table gave them a pretty good “rehearsal dinner”---they were laughing the whole time and taking pictures afterward. We ended the evening telling Chris and Natalie good-bye and walking through downtown for our last taste of gelato, which turned out to be a gelato gorge. We went to two different places just to make sure we had all of the flavors that we were so dearly going to miss once we left Italy. My favorite one was the gelato made from nutella and peanut butter….delicious!
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