Tuscany Untour, spring of 1998
by Art Henry , Fallbrook, CA
We returned home from Tuscany just five days ago, after a wonderful trip - with one disappointment I will come to. If you can, get a copy of "Under the Tuscan Sun" and read it before you leave or take it with you. It's a couple's story of rebuilding an old Tuscan farm house to retire to, and gives a wonderful feel for the real Tuscany.
The first two weeks of May, when we were there were glorious. All, absolutely all, of Tuscany was a gorgeous green of grass, forests, grain fields, and grape vines just sprouting. The weather was great, 65 to 80 degrees, with a couple of afternoon thunderstorms. There were wildflowers everywhere, pink wild roses common along the roads for example, and Flanders poppies everywhere, and the rose bushes that are planted at the ends of many rows of vines were in bloom.
1. We stayed a LeChuise 1 an absolutely charming place, a farm house, or maybe stone barn, with a cornerstone dated 1840, which has been remodeled into five apartments. Numbers 1 and 2 are directly above a small working winery, which may be functioning for those of you going in the fall, and all look out onto vineyards. They were working on more improvements while we were there, like landscaping and exterior lighting.
Allesandro, the farm foremen, is very friendly, even though he speaks almost no English, and was almost always around, plowing the vineyards, etc.. If you ask, and you will learn how even without English, he will give you a wine tasting and sell you a bottle of the farm's excellent Rosso de Montalcino for 10,000 Lire, about $7. The location is spectacular, directly below (about a half mile as a crow flies) the charming hill town of Moncalcino, which you will get to know well, and high enough up the side of the hill so that it has its own views across the fields toward a couple of other hill towns. We spent hours sitting under two huge cherry trees and reading while enjoying the grand view.
(This is not to downgrade any other Tuscany apartments, the couple of others we saw were also in excellent locations.) The apartments are large and comfortable, with safely drinkable water, and a perfectly modern bathroom. About the only problems, in Unit 1 at least, are a real shortage of counter space for the cook, and a fridge that would not get cold enough to keep milk for longer than two days. Maybe it could be fixed, but we didn't try because we ate only breakfast in the apartment. The four burner gas stove is small, but perfectly acceptable. There is no oven, but a small toaster oven which we used only for toast.
ONE MAJOR CAUTION FOR ALL LE CHIUSE RESIDENTS! The half-mile dirt road leading to Le Chiuse is safe and wide enough, but only if you carefully keep to its center and do not ever stray to the edge of the road. There are steep and deep drainage ditches right at the edges of the road, hidden by tall grass, and Allesandro had to get his tractor to pull three of us out in one week. It had a very high crown when we arrived and we all were trying to avoid hitting the bottom of the car on the center rocks. It was graded while we were there so the crown may no longer be a problem, but the ditches are still there and often hidden. Enough said.
2. Money - Do not bother with travelers checks. All of the small towns, as well as airports and big cities, have cash machines which accept not only VISA, etc., but also bank cards on the usual networks, Cirrus, etc. We never had any trouble getting cash. Also, many restaurants and stores accept VISA, Mastercard, etc. In Florence we even found a machine that changed a $20 US bill into Lire -- at a rather steep fee, but it helped when we were trying to monitor our Lire at the end of the trip.
3. Driving - Yes, Italian drivers are absolutely fearless, and/or crazy. But if you simply stay at your own pace, they will eventually pass you and get on their way and we never saw a single accident in two weeks on the road. I drove always as fast or slow as I wanted, probably passed no more than a couple of slow trucks during the two weeks, and was passed by thousands of Italians. I was careful to slow down when they were passing, but it really wasn't a problem, even though a little scary. You may have a little trouble, as I did, getting used to the small stick shift car with a grabby clutch.
4. What to do - This will vary widely depending upon individual interests. Our plan was to see the hill towns and eat our way through Tuscany, and that was what we did. (More about the eating below.) The distances are short (at least in our California terms) even though driving time through the hills is longer than you might think. Usually we would leave after breakfast for a specific destination, San Gimigano, or Montepulciano, get there in 30 minutes to an hour, see everything we wanted, have lunch and get home in time for a nap or a couple of hours reading under the cherry trees. There's a great national park and beach, for swimming even, about an hour to the west and even in May there were two topless young ladies on the beach.
Florence is about an hour and a quarter, about half of it on busy two lane roads, and if you are like us and tire after four or five hours touring a big city, you can make a day trip to Florence easily, though you won't get back in time for a nap. Of course there's so much to see in Florence it would take several such trips to do it well. Pisa could be done in a long day's drive, probably longer than most of us would want though one of our neighbors did it. The five towns of the Cinque Terra are in the upper northwest of Tuscany and would take an overnight trip. Rome is about 150 miles, too far to drive, and would take a couple of days at least just to begin to see. The hill towns are mostly quite small, but many of them have special attractions and things like good local museums. Some had many tourists, San Gimigano and Montepulciano, for example, but many had virtually none. The Chianti area is nearby and can be easily toured in a day.
5. Things we especially enjoyed - Five monks chanting mass to a bare and near empty church at the abbey San Antimo, about 10 miles from Montalcino; 23 monks on the altar, and a spectacular choir of local residents, at the gorgeous abbey of Monte Olivetti Maggiore, about 15 miles from Montalcino, jammed with locals and tourists; great cappuccino anywhere at about a buck, Starbucks doesn't even come close at two to three times the price, but remember the Italians don't drink it after noon; a flower show at Pienza, with the little town jammed with nursery displays; a restaurant in Le Befa, a town with about 10 houses, which gave just a great lunch of tagliarini, grilled pork bits, salad, and a great unlabeled local wine; the great unspoiled beach at the national park; sitting under the Tuscan sun, finishing "Under the Tuscan Sun".
6. Language - In the big cities and big tourist towns, Florence, Siena, San Gimigano, virtually all the waiters, ticket sellers, etc., speak some English. In the smaller towns some of the waiters can get you through an order but very few of the shopkeepers speak any English. However, you always can manage to buy what you want. Pointing and body language go a long way. For example, you need gasoline, drive up to the pump, point to the gas cap, lift your open hand from low to high, and you have just asked for a fill up. I tried with Italian language tapes for months before we left, but the effort was very little help. It can get embarrassing, and you do feel silly at times, but you really can get through with pointing and body language. On second thought, my years of cooking Italian at home and understanding of names of food stuffs probably made it all at lot easier.
7. Restaurants - If you have little or no knowledge of Italian foods, before you leave buy a copy of "Marling's Menu Master" from your local book store. It is a pocket size menu translator, and is carefully organized into the various courses in Italian restaurants. There are many good average "ristorantes" everywhere, all with menu cards outside. We had only two bad meals, one at a Montalcino pizza place which had been recommended by our guide book, and a really bad meal at the Osteria in Radi where our group had a delightful wine tasting lunch a few days earlier. The wine tasting was great, but we and others in our group went back for dinner to our great regret. All the food was stale and barely reheated.
Pizza is almost always with very thin crust, but otherwise very good and we all know pizza. Harriet (see below) pushes Marios in Buonconvento with good reason. It is simple, inexpensive and very friendly, and you can have a good simple meal of really local food for about $20 each, wine included. I was disappointed in our restaurant experience because I cook Italian often, really enjoy the good Italian restaurants in the US, had expected the same in Tuscany. In two weeks found only a couple of places that I felt were special. (For Californians, the kind of place I was looking for was the Il Fornaio type of place.) There just wasn't any guide to the better places, though, I repeat, there are plenty of clean, average places everywhere.
The good ones: "Boca Divino" just above the road about a kilometer before you get to Montalcino (run by an American); "Badia a Coltibuono", Lorenza DeMedici's famous place in Chianti, about an hour's drive (the artichoke risotto is to dream about); the garden terrace at the Mone Olivetti Maggiore abbey; and the very high style and expensive, $120 for two of us with their cheapest wine, "Poggio Antico" about five miles south of Montalcino on the Grossetto road. (Roast pigeon stuffed with foie gras.)
I still don't know if there were more Il Fornaio-like places around and I could find them, or if my standards were just too high (which is what my wife says). I think I'd rather not know if any of you find such places. You will hear about Trattoria Bardi, just outside Montalcino. Many people liked it but I thought it was a fraud. They put on airs, it will cost two people about $80 with a bottle of wine, but the only fresh dishes were the salads and the grilled meats. All other meats, the pasta sauces, soup, vegetables, etc., had been cooked weeks before and sat in the fridge. For wine lovers, and those of us who can afford almost anything (???), there is a great opportunity at the Villa Banfi, a glorious castle in the midst of a huge vineyard and winery about 20 miles south of Montalcino on the Grossetto road.
Their wines are rated very high and you arrive to a gorgeous table set with five wine glasses of three sizes and about a dozen pieces of silver. There is a different wine for each of five courses. (An important phrase for the driver is "un po", which means "just a little bit"). But the food, while very good, was not special: a good appetizer plate; ribbolito, a working man's soup; the same braised wild boar in virtually every other restaurant in Tuscany; slices of fresh and aged pecorino cheese; and biscotti for dessert. For about $65 each we expected more. But for wine lovers it was spectacular.
8. Dress - As informal as California, or more so. I wore a jacket and tie to the Villa Banfi wine extravaganza, and a few Italian businessmen were so dressed, but many tourists were not, some even in shorts. At the high style "Poggio Antico" I was the only person in a jacket. Same for the women. Take a few nicer skirts and blouses, but don't make a big deal about clothes.
9. Telephones - We did not rent a cell phone as Idyll suggests, and had no emergencies that would have required one. The Italian phone system works easily except for the broken public phones like you often find here.. At tobacco shops, easily located, you buy phone cards for 5000 Lire that fit in any public phone, though the public phones are sometimes hard to find. You should make reservations at the better restaurants, the three I described, and at Trattoria Bardi because they are stuffy about it. I called Florence a couple of times and had no trouble, Anyone in town can tell you where to find a FAX, in the tobacco shop, of course.
10. Florence museums - You should certainly make a reservation for the Uffizi museum at Florence, the phone is in the Idyll book, which also requires a FAX of your VISA number to prepay the tickets. Sounds complicated but we did it. There is a huge line if you don't have reservations. We didn't go to any other place in Florence because we had done that some time ago, but if you want to see Michangelo's work at the Academia or other museums, you should either get reservations (if that is possible) or try to be there well before it opens. Florence was jammed with tourists in early May.
12. Groceries - There are small supermarkets, called Coops, in both Montalcino where parking is difficult, and Buonconvento also near all the Idyll apartments where there is plenty of parking. They have anything you need. Almost forgot, if anyone runs across any decent bread anywhere in Tuscany I would love to know. What you buy in the bakery or the grocery is the same dry, hard, saltless and tasteless bread you will find in all restaurants, except those extremely expensive ones. We never bought bread in the morning, but by afternoon the bread from a bakery was so hard and dry it was nearly impossible to slice it. (Il Fornaio, where are you?)
13. Idyll - Our first experience with Idyll could not have been better. All arrangements were perfect, Air France flights were excellent with good food, everything was as advertised. Harriett Gussoni is a transplanted US southerner who is a really efficient charmer. You meet her on arrival, at an orientation the next day, and at a wine tasting a couple of days later. She is available by phone at any time at her office in Florence to help with things like a broken down car for one couple. You will be around the other Idyll people a lot in the first few days and may find some you want to do things with. We had dinner twice with another couple we especially enjoyed. Often we ran across people from the group at restaurants or on the street in a nearby town, and it really increased our enjoyment of the experience to have people to share it with.
This has gone on much longer than I intended, but then when I was a newspaperman I knew the hardest task is writing short. If there are any more questions please feel free to e-mail me, not the entire Idyll network. - Art Henry.