Touring Tuscany – Part 1

We’ve landed in Tuscany, in the small village of Trequanda (population 600).  I found this place on Airbnb and it seems like a perfect spot from which to explore some of the bigger towns and the wine region. The village seems quite prosperous and contains one of almost everything (butcher, baker, hairdresser, tourist information, pharmacy, gas station, news agent, mini mart, post office, bank, upscale restaurant, pizzeria), plus three churches and THE bar – above which is our apartment!
        
The bar is really the heart of the community, except on Sundays when it’s the church!  People come here in the morning for coffee and it seems to stay busy throughout the day.  Then around 5:30, they set out a modest spread of snacks and people come in for ‘aperitivo.’ We’ve taken to this custom with ease and are trying each bartender’s version of the Negroni. We see many of the same faces each evening and, though we really can’t communicate with them much beyond ‘buona sera’ and ‘grazie,’ we get a lot of smiles.
We are the first Airbnb guests to stay in this apartment.  It was recently renovated by Ludovic, our host, whose grandparents lived here until a few years ago.  (The wifi password is ‘nonnatina’ – Grandma Tina…) He has thought of everything and the place is quite comfortable.

We did have one glitch when, on the 4th night, we discovered that there was no water!  We texted Ludovic, who sent a friend of his father over the following morning and things were rectified pretty quickly.
I’m sad to report that it isn’t much warmer here than it was in Colmar!! But I won’t complain.  I know that a lot of you reading  this are in much colder places dealing with mountains of snow.

This has turned out to be an excellent place from which to take day trips to the hill towns in Tuscany with more familiar names. As we have seen, when we visit these places, they are much more difficult (or impossible) to navigate in a car than Trequanda, where we park 50m from our door.  Staying in Cortona or Siena or Assisi would probably require us to park in a lot on the outskirts of town and schlep our suitcases up stone streets to wherever we were sleeping.  It’s much better to drive there for the day and return to our comfortable little village.

Cortona. We started by driving up above the town to Basilica Santa Margherita. She isn’t the city’s patron saint, but she’s the favorite of the residents, so her church is considered even more important than the cathedral.  Unfortunately, the church is closed on Mondays, so we only got to see the outside. I remember walking up here on a trip in 1996…it’s still a long hike, even by car!

Automobile traffic within the city is very restricted so we parked outside the walls and walked through the town following a map we picked up at the TI on the Piazza Signorelli.  The Via Nazionale is essentially the only level road in the town (Many of the others are stairs or just very steep.)
        
We enjoyed great views from Piazza Garibaldi, and were able to climb the altar in the San Francesco church to get a good look at the reliquary that holds a piece of the cross of Christ.
    

Assisi. This picturesque hill town is most famous as the home of St. Francis (of Assisi…).

We visited the Papal Basilica of St. Francis using the Rick Steves’ audio tour on my phone and Rick’s iPad.  It was a wonderfully detailed way to visit and appreciate all that we were seeing in both the lower and upper basilicas
       
and the tomb of St Francis below the main altar.

The frescoes that cover the walls represent all the schools of Italian painting from the 14th to the 17th century.
We followed this with a walk through the town, which is built into the hillside (as you can see from the picture above). Rick had figured out that if we parked at the lower end of town (near the Basilica) and then took a bus or taxi to the upper end, we could walk downhill and end up at our car.  That taxi ride was some of the best money we have spent so far!
It was a really cold and windy day, and we were both pretty frozen by the time we reached Piazza del Comune (about halfway down), so we stopped to eat and warm up.  We happened on La Bottega dei Sapori, which does mostly a take-out business.  However, they have a couple of small tables inside among the racks of wine, and Fabrizio and his son prepared a great plate of meats and cheeses for us which we happily washed down with a half bottle of Assisi Rosso.
         

Siena:  Our visit started off rather badly when we followed the GPS directions and turned left through a Porta into the city.  We soon ended up in a restricted driving area and had a hard time finding our way out, turning this way and that on tiny little streets and down dead ends (one of which ended in a 300-foot escalator!!). Rick finally identified a local who appeared to be driving out of the city. We followed him and, Voila!  We then found a parking lot and got on that 300-foot escalator to reenter the city.  We followed Rick Steves’ walking tour and saw the highlights beginning with Il Campo, a large square in the center of the city.
        
Twice each summer, Siena hosts the Palio horse races on this square, where 10 of the city’s 17 neighborhoods (Contrada) each sponsor a horse and square off in this hotly contested race.  Pictures and videos that we saw indicate that this is a wild time in Siena…Il Campo is like the infield at Pimlico during the Preakness, and the area around it is ringed with bleachers (I guess the cafes are closed), and people in the surrounding buildings sell the perches in their windows for a premium!
A real highlight of Siena was the cathedral.  It is constructed of alternating layers of black & white marble (inside and out) that give it an unusual striped appearance…maybe this was the original inspiration for MacKenzie Childs (Ha!).
     
The interior has marble floor panels depicting biblical scenes, and the busts of 172 popes look down from above, keeping an eye on the tourists.  The cathedral library houses some brilliant, and never restored, frescoes along with a series of illuminated music scores that you can get right up close to.
       
Our final stop in Siena was the Fortezza (fort) where we had been told we would find an exhibition of Tuscan wine.  Climbing down to the underground cellar we did, indeed, find many wines from all over Italy…sitting on numbered, lighted shelves.
       
But there was neither a person nor a brochure that could provide us with any information about what was there. The bartender in the restaurant on the ground floor offered to give us a taste of a few wines but even she knew little about what she had to offer.  Oh well…

We have much more touring to do in Tuscany, but this is enough for this post.  Stay tuned…