Tuscany

So, we leave Florence. Which meant we left this (I love the guy on the right):

 

 

For this:

And to be fair, it's a whole new set of goofiness, like this:

But to be fair to Tuscany again, also this:

And this:

The two last shots go together well. Now, as I said in my last post, I'm a bit off base by saying that we left Florence for Tuscany, because Florence is in Tuscany. In fact, it is about 45 minutes away (if you don't get a bit lost, an hour or so if you do). For San Diegans, the same distance as from North County to Downtown. Yet, the scenery, the people, the pace, the food, the wines, and even the driving change dramatically. The pace slows down, and there is a timeless feel and flow to the landscape.

We had a villa, south of "Greve in Chianti" that was actually owned by a Countess! A real one, who must have been married to a real Count at one time, but nobody ever talked about him. It was an 18^th century farmhouse, with walls two feet thick, views to eternity, or vineyards and landscapes that are pretty much unchanged over hundreds of years.

So what do you do for a week in Tuscany? You eat. You drink Chianti Classico, and find Chianti Riservas that are WAAAY different than the wicker covered Chiantis of my youth (I never drank the stuff, but I remember the bottles). You tour about on the big roads, that are actually very small roads, and the small roads, which are actually dirt path's between villages, but somehow our minivan does fine, getting lapped occasionally by tiny little cars. Not something the car companies will show in the U.S. when they are busy trying to see us four wheel drive behemoths for city streets. You tour about to small towns, and you gotta go to Pisa, which is also in Tuscany, although in my Medici book, the Pisas were often at odds with the Florentines, which was in Tuscany. Confused? It's OK, there are wineries everywhere, every hill is covered with vines, and your confusion will not last long.

Now think about the photo above? Does it bring to mind a lady with an enigmatic smile? Painted by DiVinci? If so, not too farfetched, as the woman in question was from the Villa Vinamaggio…about 300 meters from where this photo was taken. I'm out of time sequence here, but we watched, at a local's advice, "Much ado about nothing" with Kenneth Brannaugh and Emma Thompson…and lo and behold, in the credits:

Good wine, too, especially the '99 riserva, which was much too young to drink, but we did anyways. We toured about as well. One necessary day trip was to Pisa. But since it is the Belk's on parade, we could not just see the "Tower", we had to google "pisa romans", and we discovered some stuff. No surprise that Pisa was a Roman city as well. However, in 1999 folks started digging a new parking lot next to the main Pisa railway station and started to discover boats. Old boats. Really old boats. Now, for the most part, wood rots in a few years, but there is a non-porous clay that these boats settled into, which shut out oxygen. And the diggers started finding smashed but intact wooden boats. With intact ropes, intact amphora (for wine), intact eating utensils. Boats that ranged from the Etruscans through the 11^th century. And they have found 31 of them. The 'real' museum is not open until 2009, but if you make an appointment, you can trek through the temporary site (i.e. active dig) for about $35 for a private guide. No photo's allowed, but their web site (in Italian) is at: http://www.navipisa.it/Scavo.htm an article is at: http://discovermagazine.com/2000/apr/cover

So what exactly happened here to have boats continually trashed over the millennia? With only one body (plus dog) found? Well, Pisa had a big harbor that silted up (see my Ephesus post!). Folks dug canals, but they had their own problems. And every so often, there would be massive storms and flooding that would trash a bunch of boats on a part of the waterway. Folks would salvage out the valuable stuff, but leave the remains in the mud. The boats would get covered over, and two thousand years later, folks digging a new garage 500 meters from the tower of Pisa stumble over a massively exciting archeological find. There is a Roman warship that they have uncovered, about 39 meters long. Uncovered, but now covered in sand again? Why, because the sucker is big enough that it extends UNDER the main Pisa railroad tracks. Ooops, gotta wait a while before we dig that one up. This will be one fascinating museum when it opens up.

So then we went off the square with the tower and the Duomo. Very cool, covered in Tournami's, but a large enough area to swallow everybody up. We wanted to go up the tower, which was closed the last time I was there in the early '90's (Olivetti's labs were in Pisa), due to one of the 8000 (yes 8000) plans to stabilize the Tower over the last 650 years or so. It's stable now (relatively speaking) but there was a three hour wait to go up the tower, so we no go up the tower. So, I've got my tower shot, but with a twist:

You can't see the motif's on this urn, but it ain't religious…it is OLD! And the reused stuff all over the place, as what is now the Baptistry was once a temple to Mars (not the planet, guys):

Our next stop was Lucca, a VERY cool little city that is also a bit weird, as we're not sure it's reason to be. Kind of a ghost town with wonderful medieval walls, and a center city that retains it's Roman origins. The Piazza de Ampitheatro was especially interesting to us, given our ongoing theme…as folks took the Roman building and co-opted it for structures that still exist today:

 

Another day we went to the town of San Gigiamano. We went there following our friends (a husband and wife from San Diego travelling without their kids, who visited us for a few days). They had a cool Mercedes B-class, we had a mini-van. Long distance, windy roads. Higher center of gravity on the mini-van. Green kids, but no disasters. This town was known as the "Manhattan" of the medieval period, as there are a bunch of HUGE towers over the city, with is a fun walk though warrens of pedestrian streets. Great views from the top of the citadel, but it was a wee bit windy:

In one plaza, when you would look at the towers, given the high winds and the white clouds going by, it was highly disorienting, as it looked like the clouds were staying still, and the towers were moving towards you. Eerie, but very cool.

Although we toured about, the real essence of rural Tuscany was hanging out, going to buy you food, going shopping. Buying your wine, drinking your wine. And all the absorbing the vistas…

And:

Although a land where time has not stood still, it certainly is not moving at the same pace as everywhere else…