Last Full Tuscany Day
It’s later than I’d planned, so this post should be less wordy than the last one. We started off today with breakfast here at San Lorenzo, which they do each morning from 8-10. They put out some pastries and cereal, and will make espresso drinks and eggs for you..nice and quick and basic. I had a chance to take a few pictures of the grounds this evening, so here are a few better looks at where we’ve been staying:
After breakfast, we hopped in the car and drove to San Gimignano, which is another town only ~20 miles away. The drive takes more like 45 minutes, as it’s almost entirely on narrow, extremely curvy, and hilly roads. It is most famous for the series of 14 ancient towers in the old city. It was much like Volterra, but smaller yet. A market runs on Thursdays (or at least whatever Thursday this was; the San Lorenzo owner mentioned the markets today when we told her where we were headed), which probably explained why it was more crowded and a bit more touristy. Rick Steves talks it up in his books, so maybe this is the norm.
After lunch and a bit more wandering in San Gimignano, we headed back to Volterra. We were able to find out way around pretty quickly, after yesterday’s time spent there. We hit the Museum of Torture (Kelly was the one who wanted to go, and definitely regretted it!), and the Etruscan Museum (interesting, but dry and with labeling in almost entirely Italian…but definitely the place to go if you want to see a zillion different several thousand year old carved alabaster urns). We somehow missed seeing the Roman theater ruins there yesterday, but managed to find it today:
There are ruins scattered throughout the area, and they are still finding more; the San Lorenzo host said that a smaller Roman-era theater was found just a few years ago when work was being done to create a new parking area. The Etruscan ruins are older yet; the waiter at dinner last night told us that Volterra is ~1000 years older than Rome. Many of the things on display in the Etruscan Museum had discovery dates just in the past few decades, so there is surely more lurking beneath. The place we had drinks yesterday even had a glass floor, showing the original structure underneath, complete with an old well pretty much right beneath the hostess stand.
After having some more wine and sampling a new gelato place, we headed back to San Lorenzo. Molly was waiting:
The time between our return and the 8 PM dinner was when I roamed the grounds to take some pictures (including some of the above, such as the San Lorenzo approach shot). The farm offers dinner every night (I think), with guests needing to let them know earlier in the day (or well ahead) if they are planning on dinner for that evening. It is an extra charge, but pretty cheap. We met a few other couples that showed up for dinner: one couple from the LA area (and rabid UCLA fans, so frowning upon hearing of Kelly’s background), another from Santa Barbara (they sat next to us, so we talked to them through much of dinner), another from Chicago, and the last couple from Germany. Dinner was great, along with plenty of wine and an after dinner dessert wine that we’ll need to look up.
Tomorrow, we’ll have time for breakfast here in the morning, and then we’ll need to pack and be off. We have about a 2 hour drive to La Spezia, where we’re due to return our rental car and hop on a train to Vernazza, our village in Cinque Terre. We might actually drive to Lucca to have lunch there, and then on to La Spezia; it’s only about a 20 minute detour from the most direct route, and is another city worth seeing in the area (not that we’ll have time to play tourist there). Our next post should have some ocean in it, with Vernazza being on the coast.