Best Of Tuscany Tour April 12, 2010
Posted by tiffany in : Florence, Italy , trackbackThe tour started at 8:30 this morning when we boarded the bus and headed to Siena. A native of Siena, our guide, took us through the city; giving us insight into how the inhabitants live both now and in the past. It was very interesting! The city is divided into 17 neighborhoods that compete against each other twice a year in a horse race in the main square (Campo). The only rule is that a rider cannot mess with an opponent’s reigns, so there is a lot of foul play among the different neighborhoods. The winning neighborhood celebrates by drinking, obviously, and putting pacifiers in their mouths to symbolize that a new champion is born (and to put shame in the loosers).
The next stop was a Chianti wine farm that is situated on top of a tall hill in the country. The view was amazing! Rows and rows of Olive trees, Grape vines, and Saffron covered the valley. Also, we could see our next stop, San Gimignano, from there. At the farm we ate lunch of traditional pasta
Ragu, salad, sheep cheese, and bread with Olive oil. About 95% of what we ate came from the farm we were on. We even met the Chianina cows!
So then we got back on the bus and headed for stop number three. San Gimignano is also situated on a hill top and is famous for it’s towers and it is also home of “the best Gelato”. There were once around 70 towers, but now ther
e are a lot less. It was a strange sight to see since the towers look like modern-day sky scrapers. San Gimignano is very small, so it was easy to navigate (20 minutes or less from one side to the other) and the city still has it’s old city walls in tact so it’s not easy to accidentally leave the city. We got there and immediately went to the Gelato shop. There were strange flavors (such as Saffron with cinnamon), interesting flavors , and tasty sounding flavors all ready to be eaten. We tried the Passion Fruit, Mango, and Strawberry.
The next stop was Pisa. We were a wee bit peckish by then, so we grabbed Mc.Donald’s and had a little picnic in front of the Duomo (Nothing says 
Americans in Italy better than a McRoyal at a large tourist destination). The guide said that the marble facade of the buildings came from many different places and we saw that because random bricks that had Celtic knots or Latin written on them, and the pieces were all different colors.
P.S. Our “cat rental” came in through the window yesterday after about two hours of meowing it’s head off on the neighbor’s roof. It was shocking and hilarious.
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