Good Morning All,
This weekday feature is for Balloon Juicers who are on the road, travelling, etc. and wish to share notes, links, pictures, stories, etc. from their escapades. As the US mainland begins the end of the Earth day as we measure it, many of us rise to read about our friends and their transient locales.
So, please, speak up and share some of your adventures, observations, and sights as you explore, no matter where you are. By concentrating travel updates here, it’s easier for all to keep up-to-date on the adventures of our fellow Commentariat. And it makes finding some travel tips or ideas from 6 months ago so much easier to find…
Have at ’em, and have a safe day of travels!
Should you have any pictures (tasteful, relevant, etc….) you can email them to [email protected] or just use this nifty link to start an email: Start an Email to send a Picture to Post on Balloon Juice
This was my pond, and these damselflies were born and raised in it. It was scary the first time I ran into the aquatic stage of this glorious creature – they look like mean-ass water bugs you shouldn’t mess with. I learned to carefully preserve them when I did major pond cleanings to ensure their lives weren’t snuffed out too soon.
And now, back to Italy….
The grand finale (for now!) of JRinWV’s diary and picture album:
I’m reprinting the entire diary because I hurt my eye today and I would prefer to rest it, so figuring out what I’ve published before isn’t as easy as normal.
Trip log of our travel to Italy in May, 2017.
We departed Monday morning, May 8th,and met friends we were traveling with in Atlanta, where we boarded Air France flights to Paris connecting to Florence, Italy. I was interested to learn that in Italy, Florence is actually Firenze. All the signage refers to Firenze, they don’t admit that Florence is a name of their city at all.
We flew overnight, after a good meal in Preferred Economy class. Air France does a good job with everyone who flies with them. We arrived in Firenze Tuesday morning, and took the shuttle to the rental car mall nearby, where a BMW station wagon was reserved for us. It was OK, had just enough room for 4 adults and the luggage.
I had an International Drivers License, $23 from AAA. Mike had rented cars in England, where they allow one to use their national driver’s license for up to 6 months, unlike the rest of the EU. So I was the designated driver, as the only person with the right papers. We had a hell of a hard time getting onto the southbound freeway, A1 Sud towards Sienna. We had a tablet with directions, and the car came with a GPS map too.
We found A1 repeatedly, but never at an interchange. We did get to see many out-of-the-way spots in Firenze, that most tourists never see. Finally, we were nearing what appeared to be an interchange, I looked over the maps while Mike went to talk to a service station guy. Success!
We drove south to the Poggibonsi Sud exit, and followed both the directions from Riserva di Fizzano as well as the map on the BMW’s dashboard, with no further trouble. The resort was ancient looking, but modern under neath. A big rose garden of yellow roses, very efficient and pleasant staff at the registration desk, apartments rather than little rooms, and a wonderful view from a high ridge top location.
We ate at the Fizzano dining room that first night, and crashed early. The next day, Wednesday, we visited the winery Rocca della Macie of which Reserve di Fizzano is one of the vineyards. We went to Castellino in Chianti before the winery tour, had a good lunch, saw that it was an interesting medieval town with shops, banks, a hospital, a rebuilt ridgetop fortress with a museum in it, etc.
Castellino in Chianti was a walled city on a steep ridge top, and today there’s a street that was beside the city wall that’s now roofed over with dwellings and small commercial shops. It’s dark, but lit with lamps in the floor and such. There are arrow slits, narrow vertical openings on the outside of the wall, but wide inside to allow archers and later marksmen to shoot at a wide field of fire, while making it difficult for attackers to hit someone inside the wall. This is common in European cities of this age.
Many of the shops aim at the tourist trade, but at least as many are local shops with food and sundries for daily life.
At the winery, which receives grapes from several local vineyards, the buildings are large stoneworks, with a giant steel statue of a rooster in the courtyard, roosters played a part in settling a dispute without outright warfare hundreds of years ago, so many genuine branded Chianti wines receive the right to use a rooster on their wine bottles.
A very pleasant woman took the four of us (Martha and I, Mike and Ruth) and a friendly Swiss couple around their 7 million bottles a year operation. Vats beside a drive-through that surrounds the main buildings receive grapes, and gently crush them as they move them into the machinery. The juice is pumped into large outdoor vertical steel tanks for the first fermentation, and then horizontal steel tanks in the cellars, then finally large oak barrels from Croatian oak for the aging of the majority of the wine.
All these large vats and barrels can be entered by a slender agile person for scrubbing and washing. The oak barrels are also abraded between uses to allow the oak to be penetrated by the wine to flavor the wine more quickly.
The best wine, though, got a longer spell in smaller French oak barrels, smaller so there is a larger ratio of oak surface to a volume of wine. Lots of discussion of the flavors the different oak barrels pass to the wine as it ages. After the tour of the winery, we sat down to taste the wines produced, from least expensive to most. They were all good, and got better as we went along.
It’s a well planned marketing effort, including the tours, discussion of the different wines and flavors, drinking lots of tiny glasses of different wines, then a sales pitch to have cases shipped home. Mike and Ruth took advantage of the sales offer at Rocca della Macie, Martha and I did not.
That night the Reserva di Fizzano restaurant, not having a reservation for us, wasn’t able to serve us, so we drove back to Castellino di Chianti and ate in one of the small restaurants on the pedestrian street there.
All the food we ate in Italy was good, some was of course better than others.
Despite a huge search, we were unable to find any bad wine either!
The next day was our scheduled Tuscan cooking lesson, at a farm called Tenuta Casanova, where the wine was organic, without sulfides. They also produced balsamic vinegar aged from 8 years to 30 years, as well as virgin olive oil, and essential oils from lavender, rosemary, and other herbs.
The farm was founded by Stephan who was a retired Veterinarian and his wife Rita? who taught the cooking class. There were peacocks, chickens, and pigs, mostly corralled away from the guests. Stephan hunts for truffles, an underground mushroom that comes in two varieties, black and white, with the necessary aid of a “truffle hunting” dog, who was very affectionate with everyone.
We started out in the cellars below the house, where dozens of oak barrels were full of organic wine aging slowly in the cool underground. Then he showed us the cellar where wine was aged into balsamic vinegar. Those barrels each had an opening in the top of the horizontal barrel, covered with a cloth. This allowed the wine to both work with native yeasts and to evaporate slowly, so that a barrel that started with 90 gallons of wine would after 8 years have half as much vinegar, and after 30 years would have a tenth as much vinegar as wine they started with.
Rita had a young assistant who helped teach the class, Francesca, who washed dishes and translated into English. Really, both of them knew the curriculum cold and led us through the many recipes so that no one could make a real mistake.
We worked to make pasta and bread dough, which was used for Ciaccino, with a variety of flavorings. The pasta was cut into fettuccine and used to make ravioli with cheese and spinach filling. We also made Tiramisu for dessert, which was among the best Tiramisu we had in Tuscany.
Along with all the dishes we made, we were served all the various wines made at the farm, and desert was both the Tiramisu we made that morning as well as vanilla ice cream with 30 year old balsamic vinegar – as odd as that sounds, it was a great contrasting set of flavors. All in all a great experience. And at the end, we were provided with a handy order sheet to have our choice of their wines, vinegars, olive oil, truffle oil and essential herbal oils shipped to our home address.
This time we went with the inevitable and picked out most of the flavors to have at home with friends and neighbors.
That evening we had most excellent left overs for supper as darkness came over the Riserva di Fizzoni. And a bottle of excellent Italian Tuscan wine, of course.
The next day, after an excellent breakfast of pastries, cheeses, meats, fresh squeezed orange juice, and fruits, we went to spend the day at Castellino di Chianti – to take advantage of the entire town, its historic opportunities, shopping, the ancient tombs, the views from the high ridgetop, and a great lunch, perhaps the best meal we had in Italy.
We paid the parking fee, which you do at an automated machine that produces a parking permit when you feed it the proper amount of Euros… then you put the permit on your windshield, inside the car, so the municipal polizia know not to write you a ticket. Then we walked slowly up the street towards the museum, inside the original fortress on a high spot along the ridge.
The first part of the walk was on a now roofed over street right beside the fortress wall around the city of Castellino di Chianti – almost like a tunnel, with lights both overhead and in the floor. And the arrow slits in the city wall let in some daylight. And the tunnel like walkway was really clean! Sweet.
Then we found the Museum. Museo Archeologico del Chianti Senese to be specific. We had been looking for it the past couple of days we had visited the little town, and finally strolled up a hilly street from the through pedestrian walkway, and there it was. Towering over the town.
The Museo was primarily the site for remnants found around an Etruscan tomb on a nearby hilltop. The tomb – aka Tumulo di Montecalvario – is four burial chambers on the cardinal directions, on a hill top just north of town, the highest point for miles. The tombs were robbed long ago, but as usual, many important scientific bits were left, and used by archaeologists to add to the little bit we know about the Etruscan culture.
Of course, for any ancient culture there is little we can know about them. These folks cared a good bit about their leaders, and worked their tails off to build them a vault where they could rest in safety. The current occupants have created a nice park at the Tumulo, a circular railing around the hill top, with the four tombs excavated and left open, anyone can walk into the ancient tombs and see the stone work done by folks thousands of years ago.
We have no idea whose tombs these were, but given the difficulty of making a living back in 800BCE, we know that a huge amount of work was invested in making their afterlife a comfortable thing for their descendants to remember.
They had some nice things left in the tombs, even the tiny bit of things left today was interesting. The pottery and adornments, the pitcher and chariot pieces showed a rich and productive life was led by the Etruscans, as far as we can tell. They are one of the more mysterious cultures left for us to puzzle about. Along with the Cathars of SW France.
We toured the museum, which had first a well-done exhibit of the remnants of Etruscan culture found on the hill tops, and then you could climb and climb up stairs ’til you come out on the rooftop, with views for Kilometers in every direction. There was also a display paying homage to the town orchestra, with some old instruments still in good shape. The old fortress was converted into a good museum covering the town’s history for the past 2900 years or so. And then we left to find the Tumulo de Montecalvario on the hill just North North West of the Museum.
It wasn’t really hot that day, but once you walked uphill for 45 minutes, being an old fart, you could work up a sweat. Luckily the tombs were in the shade of pine trees planted a generation or two ago. Most of us looked into most of the tombs, some of us not at all, some of us only for the bigger and more interesting buildings, which were very interesting. After an hour or so on site, we headed back to town for lunch and a beer.
Interestingly, the small nearby restaurant was really popular with both local folks and the visitors from far away. It was the best presentation of good food we saw in Tuscany.
The next day we headed for Firenza, with our Hotel keyed into the Google Maps application. Once we turned off the A1 highway, it got really confusing really fast.c There is nothing like trying to drive in a city “designed” for carts, horses, and men on foot! Two hours later we knew we were close, and Mike and Ruth got out to search door to door for the hotel. As designated driver, I was sort of parked in a bus stop, which lead to much horn blowing, so I drove away, after promising to meet there asap.
The tablet navigator told me to turn right and right and right, and we still weren’t where we were trying to get to. Eventually we reached the final destination. Hotel Spadia~!! Between a tiny shop and a corner beer joint/snack bar there was a pair of sleek glass sliding doors, no more than 10 feet wide, with a discreet sign. State of the art moderne hidden in a medieval stone building.
A bell man showed up a cart for the luggage, and all that was left was to find the rental car return garage nearby, some where. The tablet with talking Google Maps directions was no more help than before, with little idea of one way streets we couldn’t enter. We wound up going around the block if I missed a turn on a round-about, and the block we went around was composed of two bridged across the River Arno! Mike was helpful as in retrospect he could figure out wnat we had done wrong the last time we came to the same place, so we could figure out what to do differently the second or third time.
After finally finding the return location, they told us to drive “just around the corner, a right and a right!!!” to the actual garage, which we did actually drive right to, although the “just a right and a right” was a typical exageration! But they accepted the black station wagon, and called us a cab… 3 minutes they said, it would be here in three minutes.
And it was. Every time, the Taxi showed up in 3 or 4 minutes. The best organized bit of Italian culture we saw while we were there.
And the women, Martha and Ruth, were waiting with Prosecco in their hands when we got back. They had also wrangled an upgrade of our rooms, no charge, to rooms with free mini-bars and giant Jacuzzi tubs along with a glass waterfall shower. It was pretty swanky, with a lounge where they covered the bar with tapas style munchies during happy hour, and actually had real Bourbon, Makers Mark and Buffalo Trace.
Upstairs they served a very complete European breakfast from 8 until 10, IIRC, with cappachino, expresso, tea, juices, yogurt and fresh fruit, bacon and eggs, rattatouille, various great breads and rolls with and without fillings. No charge. Actually, I never got charged for the drinks at the lounge, either. Mike may have picked that up. Two days later when we checked out, I owed 18 Euros for some kind of room tax, that was it. When they said the trip was all inclusive when we bought it, they were not kidding!
That first night in Firenze we walked around the square across the street from the Hotel Spadio, and looked at the street market at the far end of the square, Martha stepped into a couple of leather goods shops, one of which had a salesman who was VERY persistant, would not let go. Mike and I found a bench in the first shop next door, and were offered yet more Prosecco while we waited for the shopping to conclude, which was pretty quickly, really.
We didn’t come to shop, we came to fine out about wine and food and history, and mission accomplished!
Back in Castellino in Chianti, there was a war memorial… we were curious, and Mike and Ruth discovered that it was mostly dedicated to World War I, the war to end all war! There was a small side plaque that informed the world that Italy was valorous in overthrowing the fasciests and fighting for freedom at the end of World War Two, which was true as far as it went. There’s some history for you.
But back in Firenzia there was a butt-ton of history on every building’s corner. And Mike and Ruth had just read Dan Brown’s successful novel Inferno which appears to be about Firenzi, the Medici rulers of the city for three hundred years, a pretty good run in old time Italy, which was fought over by various European powers like two big dogs over a very juicy bone. Evidently, in to the novel, the Medici rulers had a “secret” passage from their home fortress on one side of the River Arno, to the city’s ruling palacio fortress, which ran through buildings and across streets, AND across the Ponte Vecchio bridge, on top of the many shops built on the sides of the big bridge.
And in truth, there is a connection between the top of the Ponte Veccio to ther buildings on both ends of the bridge, and there are many short bridges between buildings above the streets all over the old town. Obviously, not terribly secret, but also quite secure compared to walking on the thronged streets.
Every two blocks there appears another basillica or cathedral or giant Abbey, with different styles.
Thank you for that amazing submission JR – I hope we have more to look forward to! Now I need to go rest my eye.
Have a great day and weekend everyone. I plan a bunch of catch-up photos from a number of folks Monday and Wednesday, with Tuesday and Thursday devoted to catching up on so many of Le Comte de Monte Cristo’s fantastic submissions.