Italy Part 2
Day 3, We leave Florence bright and early to catch a train to Certaldo. The train is late. This will be the norm. But this train ride is only about an hour so it doesn't affect our day too much. Certaldo is a small town located in Tuscany, somewhere in the middle of the triangle created by Florence, Pisa, and Siena. There's not much there, which is why we wanted to go. Just countryside and maybe some wine tasting and relaxing, we thought. The directions for finding our booked accommodation were as follows: "Leave the train station and take a right. Walk about 1.5 km, through the big intersection. We're on the left behind the trees up on the hill." Needless to say, we didn't bring our odometer with us and there are a lot of hills and trees in Tuscany. But we found it eventually.
Driveway
The Villa
The place we stayed at was formerly a convent of Benedictine monks. Being the kind of cross roads that it is, these monks let pilgrims that were passing through rest here for the night. After the convent, the site became home to a family farm that produced wine and olive oil. About 10 years ago this family reopened the villa as a guest house for travelers. And it is now a wicked place to stay. They have a couple of ancient dogs that mostly played dead all day long, and some cats that seemed to follow me everywhere I went. We shared a room with a couple from New Jersey, and down the hall there was a girl from Germany. For the first couple of days no one else was really in the place at all.
We made our way down to the local shop back in town to find some food for lunch and dinner. With a little bit of Italian and a lot of sign language, we managed to buy some food including the fillings of the best salami sandwiches that I've ever had. After returning back to our then current residence, we logged some quality time of R&R. We read in a hammock and, at least I, promptly fell asleep. After living in London for so long and mostly visiting other European cities or going with tour groups to the places we ventured to, this was truly the most peaceful place and time we had been to in a long, long, long time.
The next day we went horseback riding in the morning. Or as I would later call it, "almost dying." No, no, it was fun. My horse just threw me into some olive trees. Twice. But we went all through the countryside, through some olive tree orchards, through some vineyards, hills, streams, etc. Our instructor spoke next to no english, so taught me how to ride an English saddle with mostly sign language. But I learned more from those instructions than I had riding ever before.
The same morning we attempted to go to Siena but after missing a train (the platform displayed on the monitor turned out to be wrong) and then seeing that the next train was delayed by an hour, we decided to skip it. More food and ice cream replaced Siena. It wasn't a bad trade. After that we went to a cooking class. An Italian lady, again little English, taught us how to make some tomato bruschetta, artichoke risotto, and tiramisu. We went through a bunch of bottles of her homemade wine in the process and burned through over 3 hours cooking and eating and hanging out. After the lesson we stayed up a while with Anita (from Germany) and this older couple from Phoenix. More wine. More cheese. More stories. Emails exchanged and all of that.
I like cooking!
So does Anita!
Robin with Chef Giuseppina
The next morning we slowly made our way up and out to catch the train to Rome. I'll start writing about that soon. -bcv
Driveway
The Villa
The place we stayed at was formerly a convent of Benedictine monks. Being the kind of cross roads that it is, these monks let pilgrims that were passing through rest here for the night. After the convent, the site became home to a family farm that produced wine and olive oil. About 10 years ago this family reopened the villa as a guest house for travelers. And it is now a wicked place to stay. They have a couple of ancient dogs that mostly played dead all day long, and some cats that seemed to follow me everywhere I went. We shared a room with a couple from New Jersey, and down the hall there was a girl from Germany. For the first couple of days no one else was really in the place at all.
We made our way down to the local shop back in town to find some food for lunch and dinner. With a little bit of Italian and a lot of sign language, we managed to buy some food including the fillings of the best salami sandwiches that I've ever had. After returning back to our then current residence, we logged some quality time of R&R. We read in a hammock and, at least I, promptly fell asleep. After living in London for so long and mostly visiting other European cities or going with tour groups to the places we ventured to, this was truly the most peaceful place and time we had been to in a long, long, long time.
The next day we went horseback riding in the morning. Or as I would later call it, "almost dying." No, no, it was fun. My horse just threw me into some olive trees. Twice. But we went all through the countryside, through some olive tree orchards, through some vineyards, hills, streams, etc. Our instructor spoke next to no english, so taught me how to ride an English saddle with mostly sign language. But I learned more from those instructions than I had riding ever before.
The same morning we attempted to go to Siena but after missing a train (the platform displayed on the monitor turned out to be wrong) and then seeing that the next train was delayed by an hour, we decided to skip it. More food and ice cream replaced Siena. It wasn't a bad trade. After that we went to a cooking class. An Italian lady, again little English, taught us how to make some tomato bruschetta, artichoke risotto, and tiramisu. We went through a bunch of bottles of her homemade wine in the process and burned through over 3 hours cooking and eating and hanging out. After the lesson we stayed up a while with Anita (from Germany) and this older couple from Phoenix. More wine. More cheese. More stories. Emails exchanged and all of that.
I like cooking!
So does Anita!
Robin with Chef Giuseppina
The next morning we slowly made our way up and out to catch the train to Rome. I'll start writing about that soon. -bcv