Advertisement
Published: October 8th 2011
Edit Blog Post
Friday, October-07-11 Exploring the area around San Gimignano
Today the weather turned. It was much cooler and the wind was blowing like a hurricane. I needed to wash clothes and had to bring most of them inside to dry in the apartment as I was afraid they would blow to the neighbours. We got a bit of rain on and off today but never enough to affect us. We did confirm a place to stay for Saturday. We will be at another agroturismo west of Perugia,right on the border with Tuscany. That was a relief. We have been trying to mail postcards home for several days, but everytime we find a post office it is closed for the day. They all seem to close between noon and 1pm. Today we made sure to go into town before noon, specifically to finally mail the cards. Not sure how long they will take to get home, but we will probably beat them.
After that job was done, we decided to do some driving around the small roads in the area. We went down our road till it ended at an old mini village that Stefano said is now owned by a large wine
producer. Then we headed down another road the dead ended in another village. Not having much luck with those, we drove to the town of Colle di Val d’Elsa. It was shown on the map and wasn’t far so we thought we would check it out. Boy were we glad we did. It was a very nice town that you actually enter through the old fortress gate that at one point would have had a moat around it. Again it was a medieval town from the 1300s. Pretty much empty of people at 2 pm. In trying to decide where to eat, we discovered that the town is famous for its crystal work. There are several shops that produce beautiful crystal pieces. We bought some Christmas ornaments, and were very tempted on a crystal wine carafe. The man and his son who made the pieces in the shop we were in had actually made a crystal staff and chalice for the Pope when he visited the town. She had a picture of them and they were stunning. We had a great lunch in a restaurant where we were the only ones. I had pasta with wild boar and Claude had
seafood risotto. We shared an amazing bruschetta for an appetizer. We would probably have spent the rest of the day exploring the town, but needed to get back to see if our next place had confirmed our arrival for tomorrow.
We headed back into San Gimignano for our last tour around and to get meat for dinner. We visited the inside of the main church – the Duomo. It was filled with stunning frescos and was impressive as what we had seen in Florence. We did a bit of souvenir shopping, and then remembered that there was a museum with a miniature version of San Gimignano from the 1300s done in clay. What an amazing museum. With your admittance fee you get a guide (in English), to explain the whole history of the town in the 1300s for you. The whole reproduction was based on historical research so is very accurate to what was actually here. All the tiny buildings (with the 70 towers still intact), were incredibly detailed, and the guide explained it all and how they lived at that time. They had a few larger exhibits detailing life in town and in the country at that point too.
It was probably one of the best things we had paid to visit on our trip. Fascinating art in how they made it (5 sculptors 2.5 years of work, plus the research) to make it and very educational too. I think she said they used 1 tonne of clay to produce it.
By time we finished in there, the stores were closing so we headed out to get our food for dinner. Claude decided he would cook us a Florentine steak on the outdoor bbq tonight. Turned out there weren’t any coals so he had to create them with a wood fire. It was a great steak and I made a yummy bruschetta based on what we had eaten in the restaurant. We won’t have internet at the next place so tonight was spent getting caught up on my trip diary and uploading to the blog.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.093s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 13; qc: 58; dbt: 0.0594s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb