Tuscany, Italy, May 2013

Love, love, love Tuscany!!  It is so incredibly beautiful with green rolling hills, vineyards and ancient stone villages on hilltops.  On our way to our Agriturismo (farm B & B), we drove to the hill town of Ovieto for a lunch stop.  It was very quaint and lovely, but we didn't stay too long because it was pouring rain, which is why I have no pictures of it.  We had lunch (wild boar stew and salad) and then ventured onto our inn, the Tenuto San Pietro.  This place was like heaven!  So perfect!  It's an old (first century) farmhouse which the owners very lovingly restored and modernized but kept it's old feel charm.  Probably our favorite place to stay on the whole trip.  They had a lovely dining room and served breakfast (included) as well as lunch and dinner.  We ate at the inn two of our three nights and really enjoyed first class dining.  The hill town in the distance is Pienza.

After a wonderful nights sleep in our comfy beds with down comforters, we took a four-mile walk from our inn to the nearby hill town of Monticheccio.  We had lunch on the terrace overlooking the valley at a delightful little restaurant called La Porta. It came highly recommended by our innkeeper and we weren't disappointed.  

Cute Italian bikes

After lunch, we drove to the hill town of Pienza.  

Roads of love and kissing!

So hard to describe the beauty.  The Gladiator road is somewhere near here and is lined with these beautiful Cypress trees that you can see on the right lining the road in this picture.

Relaxing in our inn before another wondeful dinner.

Our second day in Tuscany, we drove to the hill town of Cortona. It's way up high on the hillside.  It's where the house, Bramasole, from "Under the Tuscan Sun" is located and we really wanted to find it. We didn't get very good directions and the GPS didn't really help, so we didn't have any luck.  We thoroughly enjoyed the town though.  After we left Corona, we drove to Montepulciano, another wonderful Tuscan hill town.

We are standing in front of the Volturi Headquarters from New Moon.  It was pretty fun for Nancy and I to see where these scenes were actually filmed.

After exploring, we went back to the inn for some reading and relaxing.  Dinner that night was one of our favorites.  We went to a nearby village to eat at 13 Gobbi.  It was a little family owned and operated restaurant whose specialty was a delicious pasta in a cream sauce that was stirred up in a Pecorino Cheese wheel with the cheese being scraped off the sides as they mixed it.  It was so good!  One of those things you can still taste just thinking about it!!

It was hard to leave Tuscany.  We could easily go back there and spend a week or so just exploring that region alone.  It would have been so wonderful to be there in warmer weather when we could have enjoyed the pool, grounds, hammock, etc.  Ahhhh, we'll have to return someday!!