Thursday, Aug 11

Florence – Thursday, August 11

Ps one of the pics is a pomegranate tree.  Beautiful orange blossom which turns into fruit. 

This was the day we went on the Chianti tasting tour.  It was a nine hour day and worth every minute.

We had to meet the group at the train station and once again, we arrived using a different route, but we did arrive.  There were 18 of us on the tour – five from England, two from Sweden, three from Norway, two from Brazil, two from Australia, two from Austria and ourselves.  We visited three vineyards.  The first vineyard / winery was Principe / Prince) Corsini which has been in the Corsini family since the 1400’s.  They were of royal descent and are still known as the Prince and Princess Corsinithough of course it is just a title since the ranks of nobility in Italy were formally abolished in 1945. Unfortunately, we never saw them, but I have included some pictures of their villa and vineyards. 

In Italy if you own a vineyard, you may only plant a third of it in grapes.  The rest has to be in two other corps, usually olive trees and something else.  This system is supposed to allow for other industries to flourish other than the grapes.  While there are pros and cons to this system, it certainly does give them a lovely landscape.    We were so happy we went on the tour; we saw vineyards we would otherwise never to have been able to find in an incredibly rugged landscape.  We ate a fantastic lunch under a huge tent with incredible views, food and wine.  Under great duress, we got back in the van to go to Greves. This small town is near the town of the home of the explorer Verrazano, as in the Verrazano Narrows Bridge leading into NYC.  It also has a very famous meat market which is known for their boar salamis, hams, other meat products and cheeses.  A family from France bought about 250 euros worth of items.  Who can blame them?

Our last stop was a vineyard which has an old Roman road running through it.  It is in the middle of nowhere.  It was originally owned by the church, but now it’s owned by a wealthy industrialist in Genoa.  The wine is delicious, but apparently they haven’t had much success in marketing it, but it doesn’t seem to bother them.  Our tour guide mentioned they were having trouble selling their wine, but we were never really asked to purchase any wine so I think I could help with the solution.  We’ll never forget the experience.  The countryside is so serene.  I understand why artists liked to paint here because the light is so beautiful as well.

The next morning, Friday, we left our great apartment to go to Siena, another interesting train experience.  Cham had purchased the tickets on line and it said at the bottom of the purchase that they needed to be printed.  As we didn’t access to a printer, we thought it would be like Paris where you put your cc in the ticket machine and out they come. Wrong.  That system doesn’t work. You have to get in line to get a number, then wait in line for your number to called. After several false starts, Cham went to the correct window only be told that she couldn’t print the tickets even though she could see the record and he needed to go to another line.  He told her he didn’t have time to wait in line for the tickets or we’d miss the train.  She told him just to butt in line, no one would mind and ask them to print them so he did so and no one seemed to mind. All of this took almost an hour so we were very happy we had gotten there early.  They let you know the track about ten minutes before departure so all you can do is wait and then there’s this mass exodus to get on board. As we have previously commented you need to have a sense of humor and recognize there are issues in our country that outsiders find perplexing.   Fortunately, I thought I knew which track we were on so we had already started heading that way.   Once again, it was a steerage ride and absolutely no one came to check our tickets.  Oh, well, better to be safe than sorry.  

We arrived in beautiful Siena in a little over an hour where we will spend 5 nights assimilating into the Palio ( palio means flag but the word is identified with the horse race, the winner of whom gets to claim the palio which is hand painted to be a unique flag for every year ) culture.  I can’t wait!  We used the date of this event to plan our trip and it’s finally here! We have both wanted to see this for so long.  I can’t wait to write about it. It’s also during the week of my birthday and I can’t imagine a better gift!