Volterra
These are my notes from my journal – hope you enjoy!
It is our first day touring Italy. Right now, we are relaxing in a little café in Volterra. The barista is singing “We Are Family” along with Sister Sledge on the radio! We ordered coffee when we came in and received espresso. (We knew to expect this --- and the barista confirmed ‘espresso’ when we ordered as well). Gary and I are sharing a pastry filled with chocolate. Nice…
We spent a little time in the Etruscan museum. But mostly we walked around the town. Volterra is old. And the Etruscan civilization is older than any other I’ve studied. It is amazing the technology that they developed before so called “modern” times.
An aside – there are lots and lots of dog owners here. It seems like Italians love their furry friends as much as we do at home!
**************************later that evening…
The villa that we are staying at is absolutely beautiful. Each guest room is named after a female writer. Susanna, the owner, obviously loves her home and her work. She is here 24/7 – always ready to chat with her guests, discuss their days, give advice and/or directions and make a pot of coffee – American style!
Getting to the villa takes a little patience. The road twists and turns and is a one-lane deal. After the one-lane paved road ends, a gravel and dirt road continues. Finally, further down than you could imagine is Locanda le Boscarecce. We managed to drive here yesterday after flying for over 19 hours. Gary is doing a great job driving here. Italian drives are much more, ummm…. confident in their driving abilities. I suspect Gary will have a hard time adjusting to non-Italian type of driving when we return to California.
Lets see – we walked today. A lot! I now understand why Italians can eat so much pasta and remain slim. It is the walking! We walked up hills, up stairs, climbing, climbing, huffing and puffing (me). I don’t recall the relief of going back down stairs – only the exertion of going up, up, up!
Oh and we took a lot of photos of doors today. The doorways in Tuscany are interesting. I wonder where they led to in the past… who goes through them now…
One of the places that I wished we had skipped was the Museum of Tortures. That was a real downer. The museum featured implements used to torture people during the Inquisition and other wonderful times like that! It was so bad that Gary and I left within a few minutes of entry. Ugh. And why we went in you might ask? I don’t have a good answer – seemed like a funny, spur of the moment kind of thing to do. Bad idea. Very bad idea.
Dinner tonight was at the villa’s restaurant. We had foie gras with duck breast stuffed with fig and a pistachio cloud for appetizers. The salad was cracked wheat that had carrots, celery, onions and small cubes of mozzarella cheese in it. This was followed by pasta with a tomato cream sauce and fresh buffalo mozzarella. The sauce was very rich – maybe it was bisque. Then we had grilled skirt steak on a bed of wild mushrooms. October is the beginning of mushroom season in Tuscany. Lucky for me! Then for dessert we had a nice light raspberry sorbet with fresh raspberries. Dinner was very good – a little expensive… but very tasty.
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