David and Gelato and Truffles

It was another beautiful morning in Tuscany, and I was enjoying awaking early and going out onto the spacious grounds of the hotel for my morning Tai Chi, looking out to distant mountains off to the west.  It was remarkably green for November, warmer than I expected Italy to be.  In a few weeks we would be traveling farther south to the Amalfi coast, which is almost tropical and features palm trees and groves of oranges.

This morning we boarded the coach and drove to Florence for a walking tour of the old part of the city where we would be staying at our Airbnb in a little over a week.  We started our day at the Piazza Michelangelo, which is on a hill on the south bank of the Arno River, just east of the center of Florence, with a stunning view of the city.  The iconic Brunelleschi’s dome, built in the 1400s, was in the center of it all, and it was huge.

Our guide was Francesca, who had a lovely Italian accent and a background in art history and architecture.

Francesca took us on a walking tour of the city, where we admired the beautiful Florentine art and architecture all around us.  The only city of comparable beauty which we have visited is Paris.  Every corner we turned there was another masterpiece, a cathedral or a building constructed by the wealthy Medici family in the 16^th Century.  In our country, a building is old if it dates to the 1700s, but here we were seeing buildings going back to the 1400s and 1500s, and we would be seeing even older buildings, medieval castles and cathedrals, in other parts of Italy in the coming days.  Our walking tour ended at The Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze, home of so many paintings and sculpture that you could spend days there, but best known for Michelangelo's sculpture of David, which stood at the end of a long gallery.  Francesca clearly admired the great sculpture and she opened our eyes to the many details you can only see up close - the veins on the hands, the muscles and tendons behind the calf.  Along the way were a series of sculptures called the Prisoners or Slaves, that appear to be struggling to break free from the marble blocks from which they are carved.

I had heard about the David all my life, but it was absolutely stunning to actually see it in all its glory, 14 feet tall, five tons, which Francesca told us was a piece of flawed marble.  What a genius Michelangelo was to create such a work of art like this!  The sculptor famously described the process of creating these statues as a matter of seeing the form within the marble and then removing everything that didn’t belong. He did not so much create David as reveal him by chiseling away the block in which he was encased.

Later, we had time on our own in Florence, and while Martha explored I sat in the Piazza di Santa Croce for awhile drinking an espresso and watching a little girl chase the pigeons.  There were a lot of scam artists in this part of the city, and we would also see them in Pisa and Rome, Nigerians according to Jackie trying to sell "Folexes" – fake Rolexes.  It was best to just ignore them and not make eye contact.

While others were exploring some of the shops in the area, we made our way using Google Maps to the Airbnb where we would be staying next week, just around the corner from the Duomo (more on Brunelleschi’s dome later in this blog).  We were a little surprised to find the entrance on a narrow sidewalk, no more than three feet wide, on a road trafficked by cars and buses that passed by very closely.  Half a block away, you could turn the corner and the street was a pedestrian one.

In Florence and elsewhere in Italy, we saw nothing but tiny cars.  Our Mini Cooper would have been considered large.  With gasoline the equivalent of $8.75/gallon, it makes sense to drive economical cars or take public transport.  Some of the cars were so short that their owners backed them in a street with parallel parking spaces straight back to the curb.

After we left Florence, we stopped at San Gimignano, a medieval walled city where a dozen tower houses have been preserved.  The towers were once a sign of prestige for the wealthy families who lived there.  Jackie took us to a gelato place voted the best in Italy, Gelateria Dondo, and while I am not a gelato or ice cream afficionado, I joined Martha in enjoying a sample.  Delizioso!

The sun was setting, and our Jackie, our tour director, hastened us on to our next stop before it got dark, the Borge Machiavelli Estate, where Niccolò Machiavelli once lived when the Medici were out of power in 1512 and he was exiled from Florence, and where he wrote his most famous book, The Prince.  The house is still owned by the Machiavelli family, and we walked to a wine cellar and adjoining tavern through an underground tunnel supposedly used by Machiavelli.

The estate was a beautiful one with lime and orange trees, and was also known for its black truffles.  The evening shadows were growing long by then, but we all walked down into the woods below the tavern where we met Pepe, a truffle-hunting dog.  Pepe did locate several truffles, and while part of me suspected they had been planted (they were very close to the estate), he did in fact detect them, and Martha had the experience of holding a black truffle in her hands.

Truffle hunting was followed by a delicious Tuscan dinner and live music, and to be honest, I did not think to write down what was on the menu when I made my notes for this blog – it all runs together, evening after evening of good food and good wine!  As I am writing this now, it is hard to believe that we enjoyed all of these things – Florence, the statue of David, gelato at San Gimignano, truffle hunting – in a single day.  Life is full of adventure in Italy.

As we returned at the end of the day, Jackie pointed out the window at another sunset in Tuscany on the horizon:  "Look!" she said.  "How beautiful!"  

 

Pasta Making and Wine Tasting

I realized today, October 31, that it was Halloween in our country, which we always enjoy celebrating in Highlands.  We would also be missing Election Day, Veteran’s Day, and Thanksgiving while we are gone.  It did not seem like that time of year in Tuscany, because every day had been warm and sunny so far.  In fact, I had only packed one short-sleeved shirt, and I would be thankful for it over the next two or three weeks.

We had already met most of our group at the reception and dinner last night.  Most of them were from places in North Carolina we have visited, such as Bath, New Bern, Calabash, and Greensboro.  This morning, we all boarded the coach for our first adventure, a visit to nearby Tenuta Torciano Vineyards just outside San Gimignano.  We met our driver, Bruno, who was very Italian-looking and wore a dashing scarf every day.  He was equally good at navigating both narrow Italian country roads and the crowded streets of Florence.  He swung the big coach around so expertly that it sometimes seemed as if the mirrors would miss buildings and trees by mere fractions of an inch.  Jackie’s favorite expression was “Andiamo,” "Let’s Go."  Everybody was picking up a little Italian along the way and we would greet each other with a “buongiorno” in the mornings, which also pleased the desk clerk and servers in the restaurant (who were always men, by the way).

Tenuta Torciano was a family-run estate that produced grapes and olives and was a venue for a number of enterprises.  We were greeted by friendly staff before filing into a large tent for a pasta-making class with chef Dante, who was entertaining and enthusiastic.

Each of us found at our station a half-cup of organic white flour, semolina flour, and an egg, and in no time we were following Dante’s instructions, mixing and rolling and cutting a sheet of fresh pasta into tagliatelle and ravioli filled with sun-dried tomatoes.  We were also given chef's aprons, which as I am writing this are hanging on a peg in our kitchen.

After the class, we adjourned to another building set up with empty plates and many, many wine glasses, and we proceeded to sample antipasti (salami, bruschetta, cheese, and olive oil), five different varieties of wine, and the pasta we had all made earlier now topped with a simple truffle oil sauce.  Our sommelier introducing the wines was a nephew of the current owner, and was equally as entertaining as Dante.  The wine was regional, mostly sangiovese red wine, and very good, and he told us that because Italian wines are organic and do not contain sulfides, they do not cause a headache the next morning (a dangerous fact for we culinary travelers to learn).

We were all a little drowsy as we boarded the coach again, but we still had culinary adventures before us as we made out way to Fattoria San Donata to sample their organic extra virgin olive oil, served with crusty bread and olives.  And, of course, more wine.

We returned to the Borgo di Cortefreda as twilight approached, and we slept well that night!

Borgo di Cortefreda

The pretty little park across from our hotel was the Parco San Donato, and that was where I went for my morning Tai Chi and a two-mile run, just the thing for jet-lagged legs.  It was a beautiful, sunny day, the first of many such days during a time of year that was supposed to be rainy and cold.  I passed some other runners and walkers along the way enjoying the weather – Indian Summer, Italian version.

We took a taxi back to the airport and after only a brief wait met Jackie, our tour director for this first chapter of our trip called A Culinary Journey Through Tuscany and Florence, which we discovered through Our State Magazine.  We had wanted to sign up last year but the 2023 tour filled up before we could, so we had plenty of time to read about it and look at photos of previous trips on Facebook.  Chapter Three of our trip was another tour through Trafalgar Tours – Best of Italy – which we had also awaited for quite some time.  During the ten days between the two tours, Chapter Two, Martha had found an Airbnb in the heart of historic Florence, a city which we had heard about for years from Martha’s now 94-year-old aunt, who had traveled abroad many times and always said Florence was her favorite destination.  Well into her 80s, she would stay in Florence with an elderly friend – “all we needed was a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine every day,” she often said.  During our time in Florence, Martha had signed us up for tickets to many of the not-to-be-missed things to see in the city.

Jackie was the perfect tour director, friendly and approachable, fluent in Italian, and obviously very much in love with the country.  Like previous tour directors we had known in the past, she was knowledgeable in history, architecture, and culture, and over the next several days she made our visit to Tuscany a fulfilling and memorable one.  She was at the airport to meet us and two other couples (a larger group would be arriving on a later flight) and drive us to our location, the Hotel Borgo di Cortefreda, tucked in the rolling hills of Tuscany between two little villages, where we would be staying the entire time until our Airbnb in Florence.  Staying in one place night after night, not having to pack and unpack, was one of the things that was so appealing about this tour.  I had already found the Borgo di Cortefreda on Google Maps and spent some time using the street view feature, virtually “driving” up and down the two-lane Via Cassia, exploring the area.  Now we were driving past actual acres of olive trees and vineyards, chatting with the other two couple we had picked up, and marveling at the beautiful countryside of Tuscany all around us.

We were greeted by a hotel cat (we love hotel cats!) who was very vocal – did I detect an Italian accent in his “miao”?

The grounds of the hotel were absolutely beautiful, with views out over the rolling hills, and only a short walk to the nearest village.  We settled in and then met the rest of our forty-or-so fellow travelers on the trip, most of them from North Carolina because of the Our State Magazine connection, at a wine reception featuring hors d'oeuvres (or, I should say, antipasti) and plentiful glasses of prosecco, followed by dinner.  

 Let the Culinary Journey begin!

Madrid to Florence

Suddenly it was October 29, just like that, and we were landing in Madrid.  I have never been to Spain before, and now I can say that I have.  But we saw no more of it than the airport, a huge nearly-empty building with high, wavy ceilings, like something out of a dream.  And we were both a little sleepy at that point as we made our way to where we thought our connecting flight might be.  There were not many people about, and at the one Información window open I realized that, although I had learned a few words of Italian, I had neglected to learn any in Spanish, such as “Where is our flight?”  We were told that we should go to the “Welling” desk, whatever that might mean in Spanish, and somehow we found our way to the American Airlines window, which was not open.  Martha somehow pulled a miracle and printed our boarding passes, and we went over to a little airport café for a coffee and a croissant while we waited.

The American Airlines window opened, we located our gate, and finally we found ourselves boarding our connecting flight to Florence.  The name on the side of the aircraft was Vueling, pronounced “welling” – mystery solved.

Travel is an exciting and mysterious and frustrating and exhausting struggle for those of us who are not as seasoned as some of the travel companions we would soon be meeting on the first chapter of our trip.  

It was sunny and mild when we landed in Florence, and there were taxis waiting at the Amerigo Vespucci Airport.  My Italian was good enough to pronounce the address of our hotel, where we finally arrived at 1:00 p.m.  That would make it 7:00 a.m. Charlotte time, but I’m not sure what time it was according to my body - sitting on an aircraft for hours on end is not a good thing for a long-legged man accustomed to regular exercise.  After we settled in a little, we located a place to eat, a pizzeria just around the corner called Da Saba Pizza Novoli.  It was loud with Italian pop music and throngs of young people were gathered outside, and it seemed to be operated by a single employee, a young man who spoke as much English as I spoke Italian.  We enjoyed a quickly-prepared thin crust pizza and glasses of very good vino della casa rosso.  We finally felt like we were in Italy.

 
Across from our hotel was a pretty little park in which we could see people walking and running and children playing.  And the sun was shining.