Arrpoo

As I read over my blogs I noticed that I missed mentioning that we had Gelato’s in almost every city. Yum. Pistachio seems to be the most popular flavor as it was gone most of the time. The coffee was superb. When we were in Rome we would go out early in the morning to find a coffee shop and sit outside and watch things start up in the city. When traveling with a large group remember to allow twice as long for everything you do. Getting seated in restaurants was not a problem but that was probably due to the downturn in tourism. We were a group of four couples who worked very well together and enjoyed similar things, which made it fun to have all of us together. We left Tuscany on July 4th ... read more

We had scheduled with Niccoletta, the owner of Stomennano, to give us a tour of the property in the morning. She spent about two hours describing the history of each room and walked us around the property. Amazing their history that dates back to the Etruscan days. Stomennano started out as a small church, the current building was added to the original church structure. Queen Margherita occasionally stayed at the property when traveling. Additionally Dante’s Divine Comedy references Monterrigioni from the view of Stomennano. Lots of history. I haven’t mentioned our hosts. Niccoletta, our hostess and her husband NiccoIo and their daughter Luisa, they were wonderful to work and interact with. And I can’t forget Mia, the watch dog, and Osavidio, the puppy. After the tour everyone headed off to see San Gimignano, Vikki and I ... read more

During our down day we conferred with Nicolleta, our hostess, on some places she might recommend we visit on the west coast. Her recommendation was a little town on the coast called Populonia. Trying to go to either the north coast or south coast would have meant all day in the car. As it was we spent all day in the car anyway. Populonia is an old Etrusian city that pre-dates the Roman times. It was this great old castle style lookout with a small town nearby. Unfortunately it was hazy enough that we couldn’t see the island of Elba, but the views from the top of the lookout were amazing. The climb to the top was interesting as you can see in the photos. We hiked and shopped the area for a couple hours and ... read more

Today we woke up at a reasonable time and felt pretty good about getting a decent night’s sleep. We took the water taxi to the train station and boarded our train to Florence. Our final destination being a little villa outside of Monteriggioni called Stomennano . Up until now our train rides have been uneventful and timely, not today. We should have expected problems when we couldn’t find our car or seats, they had changed equipment. Once we got reassigned and on our way it got a little stuffy in the car; oh the air conditioner is broken. The attendants on the train tried propping the doors open between cars which gave a little relief. Finally they offered to reassign us to a car with air conditioning but we were over half way through the trip ... read more

Leaving Rome On the way out of Rome we decided to leave early for the train station so that we could check out the Museo Romano (Roman Museum) about a block from the terminal. It was a disappointment, most of the collection was of pieces of columns and other stone fragments. The historic collection at the Vatican is hard to beat. By the way the cab ride to the Terminal was 10 euros. Riding to Venice We hopped on the train to Venice and settled in for our 4 hour tour. We spent the time enjoying the country side and some wine. We arrived in Venice well lubricated and ready for our water taxi ride to our hotel. This puts us with almost every form of transportation to get around on this trip; planes, trains, busses ... read more