Montalcino cool... weather get cooler

Typical Montalcino view

We have spent nearly a week in the Montalcino area of Southern Tuscany. At around 550 M above sea level it is typical of the best that this hill top town area of Italy can offer including;

good wine, amazing olive oil, strong tasting sheep cheese, high quality restaurants, ice cream, quality of light, panoramic patch work vistas, cypress trees, narrow streets, small craft shops, endless history, pageantry and tradition... and of course very steep hills, U bends,  flag waving locals and not forgetting a few German tourists and a lot of high profile estate agents. It is not the cheapest area of Italy but the combination of all those elements and much more provide an almost endless opportunity for that holiday feeling to spill into an everyday life.

... the flags were out

We loved Montalcino and think you would too :)

So here are some more photos so you can see why we enjoyed our time here.

There was a bi-annual festival on the weekend that we had to leave. It was basically an archery contest between the four quaters of the town - each area with a different flag. Not when it started or why but obviously it is good for the tourists but it does seem to be more than that to the people who live there. These type activities seem to involve everyone and we saw the youth of the town signing up for the practice and pre-tournament elimination session. It looked more like a drinking and talking contest than anything to do with bows and arrows but at least the kids were not daubing the streets with graffitti at night like in many of the Italian towns we had passed through.

Pretty little streets

The streets themselves are fun to explore with numerous surprises like the 'Wine News' funky offices with harlequin mannequins and a public garden including a school children’s vegetable garden. All this set into a green terrace with pan tiles roofs at multi levels surrounding you. In October the weather was in the 70’s wall to wall sunshine with only a few fellow tourists and the towns people going about their daily routines.



Two nights in the Alle Loggia La Piazza  :)



Wine is king in this town closely followed by olive oil and honey... and at first it all looks a bit snooty but in the end you just except it as a pride thing – it is what they are good at and they are passionate about it. The wine is relatively expensive, no 1.40 Euro bottles in the supermarket here. The poshest wine bar (Alle Loggia La Piazza) sells it by the glass, by year and served very strictly at 16 – 18C. The better the year the more it costs. A Montalcino d’ Rosso  (local red) starts at 3 Euros a glass for the 2007 (very, very nice) but you can pay 8 Euros for the 2010 (we never did)… So as you will have already realised if you are like us it pays to start with the 2010 and then get rat arsed on the inferior years. We did miss the 1L jug straight from the vat for 3 Euro that we got in Siena and most places in Italy - but that is wine bars the world over for you!

Fog down in the valley

One morning after it was a bit colder overnight and although it was clear and bright up top on the hill the fog down in the valley looked just like a sea of cotton wool or snow even. This sea slowly moved around the valley floor giving the most amazing photo opportunies.

Olive harvest

We tasted some 1st press virgin olive oil in the wine bar.. only a couple of days old. It was green as grass and had a really strong taste and smell. If you have ever eaten a ripe olive straight from the tree you will know the taste and can imagine that it is a bitter sweet experience and not for everyone. However, drizzle it on some bread and it is another tapas dish for a Friday night. Olive trees are everywhere in Italy and someone owns every single one : ) The old guy in the picture appeared with his mother and another even older women to comb a tree near the car park... this is really hard work. The old ladies did the collecting from the net while he did the combing with a giant mechanical two bladed rake thing. It is no wonder that olive oil isn't cheap - harvesting just a few trees takes all day!

Have fun - Den and Jane X

So it's early darkness and the weather is colder and wetter – for us all.

You are never going to guess where we have got to today – more next post.

 

Right, past Rome… and into Tuscany

Pizza!

Recapping a bit on our last post….. driving through Salerno on the way to Pompei was nothing short of hell. Sat Nav Suzie went loco and we ended up in a warren of tiny streets with very low balconies that we were far, far too big for. Horns honking, arms waving and lots of shouting and that was just Den, the Italians on the whole saw the funny side. With Jane in front ‘walking the route’ asking the road work crew to put the manhole covers back please and pointing at the balconies, we crawled at 2mph through this rat’s nest of 90degree bends. When we finally got to the camp site - just outside the gate of Pompei -after 6 hours at the wheel we were both exhausted. We weren’t going there but to be honest by this time Suzie had re-calculated herself to death and we realized that there are actually two Pompeis within a few miles of each other. The campsite was a car park next to the rail station masquerading as a citrus grove. So with oranges banging on the roof as you parked and trains thundering by we were not expecting much but were too tired to care.

In the morning things always look better and the trains didn’t run late into the night so we were pleasantly surprised, so surprised that we ended up spending three days there. Friday night tapas with local bread, cheese and wine helped.

So a showery day in Pompei (covered in last post). As we were camped next to the train station we decided to take the train to Naples the next day as at 9 Euros for both of us it was a bargain especially considering that some old streets in Naples are even narrower than the ones we got stuck in in Pompei.

Naples

Naples is one of Italy’s most chaotic cities, think third world with a  bit of café culture and you have a lively melting pot of one million souls. We loved it, all twelve miles that we walked. The traffic has to be seen to be believed, crossing the road, even on a zebra crossing, is an act of blind faith. You can easily be forgiven for thinking that you have become an extra in a Bond movie, the atmosphere can be that exciting!! The amazing backdrop of Vesuvius’  chasing the Island of Capri across the Bay of Naples does nothing to upset the illusion.

Sorrento over looking Bay of Naples

The next day we headed to Sorrento, it looks out from it’s cliff top down the Amalfi Coast in one direction and to the Bay of Naples in the other. It was a thirty minute, eight euro train trip that gave us another drive free day to recover. Sorrento is one of Italy’s top tourist destinations and as such is full of shops (new boots for Jane) and every other conceivable way of getting the tourist euro! The place is a joy to walk, with a warren of tiny streets, packed with people, just like us. You can tell from the estate agents window that with a price tag of £500,000 for a 50 sqm one bed apartment what sort of people actually live here, not us!!

Happy campers - Sperlonga

Just like the legions returning home, we marched on to Rome. Well Sperlonga actually – an expensive holiday village thing which was more like a dying shanty town than a village, in October. Lovely beach though, complete with restored castle and surfing dudes.

Sunset at Latina

Latina, about 80 km from Rome was different from anything we had seen so far in Italy. Our campsite was in a National Park, on the coast and apart from being woken by duck hunters it was clean and green. Footpaths, cycleways, walkers, joggers and even litter pickers. Add lush vegetation, canals and a beautiful sandy beach and it was more like California than Italy. We did have a sneaky suspicion it was a dormitory for rich Romans who pay for the nicer things in life.

Civita Castallana - main piazza

Civita Castallana 30km north east of Rome, a good Latin sounding town, with a medieval old town that had seen better days but was fun to explore. Free mineral water at the campsite and the best free toilet in all Italy – at the cemetery! Maybe dead people don’t steal the toilet paper or pee on the floor?

We had no plans to stop at Rome this time but we did have to navigate the ring road, imagine the M25 with Italians all driving with their phone to their ear, coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other all desperately looking for a loo with toilet paper………..

South Tuscan hills

As soon as you enter Tuscany the Italian picture postcard and Italian restaurants back home come sharply into focus. Without ever having been to Tuscany it’s all very familiar. Rolling hills, hill top fortress towns, neat row upon row of vines and ubiquitous olive trees, creating a giant tapestry bathed in glorious sunlight. Yes, we were impressed and 500 photos later, we still are. Tuscany is clean, wealthy and upmarket, in a way that has seen rich Brits buy here big time with big money. Most hills have £1million plus properties sitting on top of them, no sign of a recession here, Chiantishire  is alive and well.

Hill top Tuscan town

The sheer beauty of virtually every vista makes it all too easy to forget what Tuscany is about. There are real Italians here and you can get reasonably priced wine in lovely little restaurants, however, the local wine, Brunello, Italy’s premier wine, retails for around 30 euros a bottle even in the supermarkets. We can’t tell you how it tasted but every year a small army of people with too much money pay homage to the grape, buying up piles of rubble and  turning them into another hill top palace. O.K. you guessed it – we admit it, we loved Tuscany but can’t afford to live here!

Montepulciano

Tuscany’s beauty and the sense of unease it brings seem strange bed fellows but look a little harder, scratch the surface and you glimpse what life ‘everyday’ must be like here. It has an almost sterile look and feel, perfect if you are on holiday and want Italian food, Italian wine, Italian everything. The often misunderstood thing about being English is not that we don’t like England or all things English, it is that we don’t like ‘everyday’! For example today we eat Italian, tomorrow burgers and then fancy an indian or Chinese meal at the weekend. This would be impossible in Tuscany. For us anyway, ‘everyday’ and ‘anywhere’ blend seamlessly to celebrate the diversity of life itself.

Translations of this blog are on sale at www.updensownarseorwhat.com for 50p a copy!

Time to look at the pretty pictures of Tuscany;

Pienza

 Montepulciano – stunningly beautiful but unfortunately not the home of the wine of the same name that we drink back in the UK – the real stuff is expensive.

Pienza – in our opinion ranks as one of the prettiest little towns on the face of the planet.

Siena Duomo

Siena – incredibly vibrant and beautiful city centre, better in many ways than Rome or Florence, especially if you like liquorice allsorts.

San Giovanni d’Asso – big name, tiny but beautifully formed, hill top town.

Lunch at Siena's 'Campo'

We still have Montalcino to visit and we’ve been told that it’s the most beautiful town in all of southern Tuscany – this we must see before heading to the coast as a cold front is coming that looks like snookering our plans for shorts until November.

Take care

Jane X and Den

Beach, sun and sand but heading North brings Autumn…

Fun in the Italian sun

As we mentioned in an earlier posting if you travel Italy you will never be far from the sea. The middle is mountainous so you travel along the flat coastal strip. So far we have not spent at lot of time by the sea but that all changed after Puglia.

Paddling at Metaponto

Basilicata and Calabria the final two regions you travel through if you go as far South as you can are more mountainous than most. Where have we been?

Metaponto  - Sun,  sand and a lovely long beach walk. We stayed two nights, Friday was pretty  perfect and Saturday was hell. An OAP hoe-down in our RV park that went on until 2 am, well it sounded like it was. Then a beach bar rave thing that went until sun-up

Minnie on the road

 : (

Ciro Marina – Gum tree shaded spot with gravel beach and shabby little town. We are a bit of a curiosity in these small towns… It is a disconcerting stare and second look, very pale complexion, English plates and driving something that big down this little street sort of curiosity. We have seen a few German and a Swiss couple but when we are not alone (at weekends mainly) it’s normally an Italian family group.

One man and his dog

Cropani Marina - Another small beach town with some very noisy Italians. Listening to these guys sounds like they are killing each other when they are ordering a pizza is entertainment. When it comes to politics or football it is scary.

Lamezia...  'look at the view'

Lamezia Terme In fact three towns all linked together. The highest one was big and full of designer shops and expensive labels that we had never heard of. It had a long pedestrian street all lit up at night with lots of cafes  restaurants and ice cream parlors.

Walking the beach

Then on to Scalea a typical Italian tourist sea side town… we have seen lots of them. It must be crazy in summer (July an August) with high prices and very noisy Italians cheek to cheek on the beach but in October it made a great stop for a couple of days camping virtually on the beach. At 10 Euros (£8) a night we had our own beach and sunsets.

Pompei with Vesuvius looming in the background

 Pompei the roman city preserved when Vesuvius erupted on 24^th August 79AD was our next stop. 20,000 of it’s inhabitants perished after being overcome very suddenly by the poisonous gas cloud that flowed down the mountain ahead of the 60ft of ash that buried the town until the 1700s. It is a truly amazing site as it is literally a complete town where you can walk the streets and go into the temples and people’s houses, sit in the arena and easily imagine Roman life continuing on today. It would even appear as though Italian toilets have not changed that much in all that time : ). Although still warm it was a bit showery as autumn finally caught up with us. You can also find more on Chris’ blog as he was there only a couple of weeks ago… in the sunshine.

Wet lunch at Pompei theatre

 Ever wondered what your perfect little piece of planet Earth would actually look like? Maybe you have it already? As we travel it is increasingly obvious that perfection is unlikely. In fact your view of heaven is likely to be defined by your individual level of compromise. So far it has been a perfect trip… we have been kept awake at night by trains, river barges, traffic, yobs, gipsies, church bells, dogs, chickens, loud music, mosquito bites, planes, a generator and even a car boot sale! Desert island anyone?

As Chris will know moving on means everyday is full of new places and interesting things and new challenges. Travelling is not all fun though it’s a life choice, not a holiday. How does it go Chris… ‘a traveler without observation is a bird without wings’.

Sun set a Scalea

Can you imagine how frustrating it has been with 20 CD’s including an Italian Language course : ) and a CD player that refuses to play them. We had the aerial sorted out before we left but never checked the CD player. They always work when they are new don’t they? Not this one! So, it has been Italian radio all the way. It is mostly a strange mix of crap and Euro pop crap. Our radio life has been saved but the national Italian station, RTL. Radio becomes much more important when you have no TV (and nothing else if there is no electricity). RTL has a fairly limited play list but it is mostly UK/USA. So,the sound track for the trip has become’ Champions’ by The Script with Will.I.am wrapping and ‘This girl is on fire’ by Alicia Keys. With Strictly getting started on the TV at home this week we are praying our recorder is smart enough to sort it all out. To be honest it is the only thing we miss without a TV here in Italy or in the USA for a year.

Sorrento tomorrow… with more thunderstorms forecast : (

Take Care

Den and Jane X

Puglia, sunshine, wine… and week long Sunday afternoons?

Torre Carnne

This week it has been all about Puglia, the southern region that is the heal if you think of Italy as a boot. It is a pretty laid back part of the world being more like a mix between Greece, Spain and the southern USA / Mexico given the heat and the parched landscape. It’s flatter than most of the rest of Italy so much so that we have not fallen out of bed when coming down the ladder so often. Campsites world wide tend to be located where nothing else more profitable can happen and a level site in Italy is rarer than an Italian who stops at a zebra crossing : )  Puglia is also the only area in Italy with minimal risk of seismic activity but we aren’t parking under any flyovers / bridges / tall buildings… Washington DC had never had an earthquake until we got there.

a 'Trulli' in Ostuni area... not the town house!

We started at Torre Carnne, a sunny  beach hugging hamlet with lots of bars, pizzerias and holiday rentals. We had a romantic meal (sorry no yacht and ring, Kate) and our first pizza. The restaurant was good but to be honest the pizza was not one to write home about…opps, too late!

Then on to Ostuni, the white city that sits up an a rocky bluff about 12km from the coast The old town is literally a white, gleaming, simmering magical jewel from a distance. At first sight Ostuni is more biblical vision than the dense warren of tightly packed shapes of medieval architecture intersected by single track cobbled streets that it turns into on closer inspection. Many of the so called streets are too narrow for even the smallest car. Although it is a little surreal and has the feel of a well proportioned movie set real people do live here swelled by camera clicking tourists from around the world – the view to is pretty impressive. 

Ostuni

We like Ostuni…  and even considered buying a town house there… well restored 3 houses made into one which was connected to six or seven others in ways that can only evolve over untold years of continuous habitation. Bottom line? it would be fun to live here - for a few years anyway. However, when you came to visit you would think that we had gone crazy!

Idiot abroad?

Lecce

Ostuni madness gave way to big city grandeur. Lecce is one of the biggest cities in Southern Italy but the old historical city centre is walkable and after camping that’s just what we did. We got the bus into the centre, always an experience in another country and walked and walked. The guide books call it the Florence of the South, beautiful, baroque, limestone facades and it even has a giant Opera House but Florence it is not. There are no beggars for a start : ).

We move on to Gallipoli via Cutrofiano, a little town the size of Woodbridge that was in the middle of a 2 day festival. Cutrofiano’s festival just highlights how far climate and its resulting impact on culture shape the way we spend our day. Culrofiano at 12:30 was completely empty – nothing moved – some festival! Can you imagine Woodbridge or Aldeburgh at mid day, carnival day? It would be a mass of people, the day finishing with a procession around tea time maybe. In Southern Italy (well anywhere hot) after lunch it’s just like a Sunday afternoon – every day of the week. The festival didn’t start until the  town had woken up again at around 5pm. By this time we were all walked out in the 30C heat, totally knackered and had moved on to our campsite in Gallipoli. Sometimes it’s tough being British and while we are on that subject it does not come any tougher than what happened to us Brits at Gallipoli. Gallipoli was one of the Allies great disasters in the first World War. The plan thought up by Winston Churchill to end the war early by creating a new front resulted in the loss of thousand of lives as we totally underestimated the opposition.

Cutrofiano

We didn’t underestimate the opposition, armed with extra fly spray, earplugs (dogs and bells this time) and an offer from Michel to learn to drive like an Italian. Although parking is the national sport in Italy driving is something that they are very, very proud of. We can now drive in insanely narrow streets where people just stop their cars anywhere (even in the road in front of you) to say “ciao” or pop into the local shop. We do this at speed while using our mobile phone, smoking, drinking a cup of coffee and talking to the passengers in the back. OK, I lied about the passengers bit – we don’t have any.

We have now travelled over 2000 miles and are now rapidly approaching the toe of Italy where we will begin to head north and slowly back to the UK

.

Take care

Den and Jane X

PS Think of us writing the blog, sitting here in our swimming costumes, after two days on the beach.