5 Jan 2021 – Our Man In Volterra

If Siena is my favourite hilltop city, and Volterra is my favourite hilltop town, then Casale Marittimo is my favourite hilltop village. (Incidentally, Quercerto is my favourite hilltop hamlet!).

We’ve been here a few times before, most notably on May 1st, 2019 – Labour Day in Italy, when the whole village was out celebrating with a fava bean harvest. They were playing some sort of bingo, with numbers being shouted over the main square. Here are some photos taken back then!

However, I was acutely aware that we hadn’t done a full explore of the place. We would rectify that this time around. But first thing’s first: I went on a walk that morning, by myself (up yours, anxiety!), but by the time I reached the part of the road overlooking Chiesa di Sant’Alessandro, I began to earworm Springsteen’s ‘My Home Town’, and had to fight of tears for much of the rest of the walk – I really didn’t want to leave, but we had to soon. I still managed the full circumnavigation of the town’s walls, though – so I won in the end!

Back to doing something happier! We decided to go to lunch in one of the Chinese restaurants closest to us: La Grande Cina in Marina di Cecina (40+km away!). We’d always found it passable before… this time, it was a little different. It was stinking hot, and was absolutely freaking mobbed, so that we had to wait a good 20 minutes for a table. The food we had there was so-so in the end, so we were disappointed.

We countered that by going to Casale Marittimo afterwards and grabbing a gelato there (it was about a .6 on the Isola del Gusto scale, so still yummy!).

The place is crawling with hidden lanes and stairways, and we explored most of what we previously hadn’t.

Not much else was done, and if I recall correctly, this was our last day-trip of this stay in Volterra. That evening I think we had to begin to use what was left in the fridge, and so ate in. Still, it didn’t stop me taking a couple of snaps of Volterra that evening.