Month: February 2024

2023)

We were due to pick up a friend who’d be staying a a few days with us. This was also the weekend that we discovered that Tuscany had developed some sort of weird monsoon weather front. For weeks, it would be nice in the morning, but come 11 or 12 dark clouds would gather and then it would pour rain for a while, then spatter until the early evening. We’d not seen such a prolonged weather front like in Tuscany like it before.

Friday, 2nd of June
Well, we still had one working day to see off before our 2-week holiday kicked-in. I had too much cheese for breakfast – pecorino aged under walnut leaves, with black-truffle infused honey. For lunch I had yummmy tagliatelle with ragu in Porgi L’Altra Pancia – alone! Niamh had lunch back in the apartment.

However, after work I had a wee glass of Santa Lucia’s finest to start off the holiday with a bang, and said goodbye to this precipitous drop from my ‘office’ window.

So vanilla-y! Note the rain on the window.

Earlier in the day during work, I had to shut the window firmly, because the sbandieratori (flag jugglers) and their accompanying band marched through the street directly outside. The window does a fab job of muffling noise, which is a good thing, as people stay up late during the summer months outside. Anyway, that march usually means something is on, and indeed it was. Every year the various contrade (neighbourhoods) compete in a couple of palii (plural of palio). In Siena, they race horses at breakneck speed around the main square. In Volterra, we have tugs-of-war in June and, believe it or not, race wheels of cheese through an obstacle course in October.

Today, it was tug-of-war day! Teams of mixed genders from all the contrade, which includes villages within the comune of Volterra. The event was delayed by the main weather feature this year: torrential rain. After a while, however, the competition-runners thought the piazza dry enough to kick off proceedings. In my humble opinion, and I would guess the opinion of the first few teams who were placed at on the southern side of the square, it was still too wet. Anyway, they had to go ahead, and arrange their teams on either side of the – I wish I knew what it was called in Italian – but it for all the world looks like the wooden base of some medieval siege engine. It was their job to tug the base over the line on their side. If both sides failed to do this, it would be in the hands of the judges as to who made most gains during that contest.

The first teams lined up, and you could see that half of the southern team had feet on wet flagstones. The competition was swift and decisive and went to the northern team. The protestations about wet ground fell on deaf ears and the competition continued. The group did begin to dry up pretty rapidly.

In the end, the victors were Villamagna – a town across a part of the Val d’Era surrounded by spectacular views. You can find the video of our trip to Vada during the previous weekend, and the palio!

After we’d watched the planting of the winning contrade‘s flag in the, er, wooden thing, and have the winning team run a couple of the circuits of the piazza, we got up and walked to L’Incontro for a quick aperitivo. Then it was off to get our usual very warm welcome at La Mangiatoia. We both opted for pizzas and beer.

Speck and Mascarpone… ham and mushroom in the background

There’s no pizza without beer, and this year we seemed to favour north Italian beer Først, instead of Moretti. It’s nice and refreshing! Speaking of booze, we then decided to visit Pietro in Antica Velathri Cafe for some spiffy cocktails (and to practice my Italian – he’s very kind like that!).

I think Niamh had a G+T which happily changed colour based on a light in the bottom of a glass holder. I had a lovely mixture made up by Pietro on our previous visit a few months ago: frangelico, grenadine and cointreau. Very yummy indeed.

Saturday, 3rd of June
The next day, we decided to stay in Volterra and check out the marketplace. But first, a wee walk!

The mornings were the best time of day, weather-wise

After washing and re-dressing (thank goodness), we went to the market!

I think the colours of the March market were a little more vivid. What do you think? Town was getting busy and warm, and to counteract this we decided to go on a little jaunt to La Rosa after having a granita (me) and gelato (Niamh). We wanted to see if we could find the supposed new location of La Rosa’s mercato del usato (Italy’s wonderful 2nd hand bric-a-brac markets).

On the way to the car, we spotted a hen party. I thought this rather unusual for Volterra, but I’ve actually seen a couple more since. Volterra, as much as I love it, isn’t exactly party-central. It does get loud in pockets during the summer, but largely it’s quite a quiet place. But everyone’s welcome!

We went to La Rosa, and for the life of us couldn’t find the new location. The old location was firmly shut up and there was no sign of life. Google was pointing us towards the back of a warehousey-place on the opposite side of the road – and we drove around it – but no joy.

We then went into one of those ‘Chinese’ stores, which seem to be a variant on ‘pound’ or ‘dollar’ stores you’ll find elsewhere. If in Ireland, think ‘Eurosaver’ or ‘Mr. Price’. Anyway, we did have some stuff to pick up for the house… cleaning implements and sprays. We found what we needed, and then also spotted a sun-reflecting screen for a car. It’s the kind of thing you unfold against the windscreen to reflect the sun and keep your parked car relatively cool. It was only a fiver, so it went in our basket.

On checking out, we asked where the 2nd hand market was. One man in the queue behind us said it was gone, but that there was one in Capannoli – which we knew about. The Chinese lady at the register thought it was still about and maybe on the block next to her’s. We thanked everyone, and wandered out – without the sun reflector. We didn’t realise this until days later, hilariously. We had a search for the second hand market around the block suggested, but to no avail. Oh well.

It was well within the lunch hour, and not spotting what we wanted nearby, we had a look at Google maps in the car, and spotted a well-reviewed place between La Sterza and Lajatico: La Valatta – which is down in Google maps primarily as a hotel/agriturismo – and it is also just exactly that. No sooner had we selected the place and begun to leave La Rosa, it began to absolutely pelt rain. Utterly torrential, with accompanying sound and light show.

The rain didn’t let up, and when we pulled into La Valetta’s carpark, we had a 30-40 meter dash to the restaurant in the lashings of rain. We survived the run (that’s cardio for the weekend!), and walked into a completely empty restaurant. Uh-oh. I located a lone waiter and pounced, asking him if the restaurant was, in fact, open. He had to check with a colleague before confirming. We were seated and sighed in relief.

More people came in as we ate, so we weren’t entirely on our own. I have a bad habit of wanting to try a few courses in restaurants I’m eating in for the first time. So yeah, we ended up having three courses. The food here was really good, but I remember the meats being perhaps a little more gamey than you usually find in touristic towns.

I think this was beef tongue, but I am not sure

By the time we rolled out of the place, the sun had come out (sort of), and we got a good look at the place from the outside.

We drove home via Lajatico, which brought us via a pretty route and that was pretty much all she wrote for that day, except that I gave our new sexy chair a go that evening.

Sunday, 4th of June
I have to shamefacedly admit that I remember precious little about this day. There’s no doubt we had a lazy one, and ate kind of light too, with Porgi l’Altra Pancia getting our love again.

I hope you enjoyed the read – let me know what you think!

A Week of Working (29/05-01/06/2023)

This will be a blog of many photos but very few words.

We worked this week, and when that happens nothing terribly exciting or noteworthy tends to happen. I get up, I go for a walk, I shower/change, then work. In the middle of the morning I get a gelato, work, lunch, more work, quit. I think you get the picture. There is something nonetheless wonderful about working away. The weather is usually better, the food is miles better. Gelato. After work, it’s aperitivo time, maybe meet and dine out with a friend or two.

So, with this in mind, I present to you our working week, mostly in photo format.

Let’s do this a little differently, and instead of going day-by-day I’ll group the photos in to various themes and spit out the whole lot. Firstly, walking within the walls of the town!

It bucketed down one day after lunch in Osteria Fornelli

The rainy day above somewhat set some of the mood for this stay. We couldn’t stay under the arch or we would have been late for work. We had to dash and get soaked anyway!

Next – what did it look outside the walls?

At the time of writing this, this lift STILL isn’t operable – but is close to being so

Finally, the pics related to food and drink. Sometimes we ate out, a lot of the time we ate in. It was all, unsurprisingly, good!

That was the week that was in it. I hope you enjoyed the photographs!

We get back to Volterra, then split to the coast (27-28/05/2023)

I guess it was on the cards, wasn’t it? Yes, we came back – we always do. This time, it was for 4 weeks. We broke down this time between holidays and working away (‘smart-working’ as it’s known in Italy – yes, they use that English phrase!). Our first week was spent working, the next two holidaying, and we finished up by working again. I would always recommend finishing your time abroad by working, if you have that benefit as an employee, or if the work you do suits, as a self-employed person. The post-holiday blues are split between (a) returning to work, and (b) returning home. The last couple of times I did this, I barely felt any sadness at all when I flipped open the laptop and started work. It sounds counter-intuitive – but trust me: work just before you go home.

Anyway, enough pontificating. We began this (surprisingly wet – more in weeks to come) stay with the guts of a weekend – three-quarters of Saturday and a full Sunday.

We got up at sparrowfart to take the flight over, and so we were tired enough when we got to Volterra. We dropped our bags up and had a little explore and a light lunch. We bumped into our friend at Volaterra before she had to get back to some work, and we had to get back to some food.

Afterwards, we had a wander towards the panoramic viewpoint at Piazzetta dei Fornelli.

Home to rest, and then out again. We always like to call into La Taverna della Terre di Mezzo as early in the holiday as we can to say hello to Robbi and Aurora, who always treat us so well. We had a wander about Piazza XX Settembre first.

But then it was time for the main event! We ate in the Roman-era cellar – it was lovely and cool down there. The wine and food pairing was as yummy as always.

As we’d had a little bit to eat in Volaterra, we kept it to just two courses. Then, to bed – as we promised a friend we’d meet her in Chianni the next day to catch up and treat her to a little lunch.

There was a spring in my step the next morning, as it was a Fun Day Out™ day! Such was my effervescence, I headed out for a lengthyish walk. Firstly, past the main panoramic viewpoint, then on down Viale dei Ponti, past fonts and fountains and onwards and back upwards to Porta a Selci.

Instead of going through the gate, I walked towards our carpark, but carried on further ’til I hit the private carpark at the Seminario di Sant’Andrea. At least I still think it’s private – it now has a P symbol on Google maps, but I still think it’s not for use by the public. If there are any Volterrani reading this, please let me know! Anyway, I captured some less-often taken shots there.

It doesn’t look like Volterra from this angle, but it is!

I walked back up, to our carpark and entered the town at Porto Marcoli, and walked by the back of the block that faces Piazza XX Settembre.

An Ape… the Vespa’s slightly bigger brother

The morning walk and ablutions out of the way, it was time to go to Chianni!

Chianni is a cute village only about 20km away on the far side of the Val d’Era. It has a sweet centre with super views of the hills on one side, and has forested mountains to the other side. The two bad location aspects of Chianni (purely from our perspective) is that it still takes about 45 minutes to get there from Volterra. Ah, those Tuscan roads! In fairness you are driving through some lovely rolling countryside to get there. The second one… well, we’ll talk about that later.

We parked opposite the carabinieri station (there’s an unmarked (on Google) carpark there) and walked 6 or 7 minutes to the lovely little central square, where we found our friend, Marisa, already filming there. We waited until the end of her take before tapping her on the shoulder.

After hugs and pleasantry-swapping, we got to the serious business at hand: lunch! Marisa took us to Chianni Bistro, which as excellent reviews on Google. They were lovely – they sat is down and provided pedestals for the ladies’ handbags. None for my little man-bag, strangely, but hey-ho. Anyway, lunch was lovely, especially the pasta courses.

Marisa hit the winner here with gorgonzola gnocchi

After dinner we decided, what the hell… let’s drive somewhere fun. Niamh and I already had in our minds to check out the beaches around Rosignano Solvay, and ask Marisa if she’d like to come. We waited for her to collect some things from her house (which we couldn’t see at the time as she had a guest staying there), and headed out!

This brings me to the second unfortunate thing about Chianni. To be clear, Chianni is gorgeous, and the good faaaaaar outweighs the bad! If you want to get to the coast, however, you will find yourself having to undertake a bit of a dull and overly-long drive over the mountains to the east/southeast. There aren’t many views, as it’s largely forested. But when you actually get over the mountains and you are heading towards the coast, then you’ll get to see some amazing ones over the Tuscan coastal plains.

We drove through the cute little town of Castellina Marittima, and there we saw in the distance the huge towering stacks of Rosignano Solvay. Sadly we have no photos of this. The factory looms near the famous white beach. It makes soda ash, which is used in the manufacture of sodium bicarbonate and glass. So, the beach nearby is brilliant white soda-ash! As we got closer, we couldn’t decide on a car-park, plus we noticed there was a hell of a lot of traffic heading that way. Therefore, I made the executive decision to head to Vada instead. We’d been there before, and I felt that we hadn’t done it justice. There had to be more to it than just the little stretch of strand we found.

We found parking there much closer to the strand than we had before – right in a piazzetta with a couple of bars/gelaterie, and wandered to the mini-strand. Marisa has her own YouTube channel too, and I was happy to sit back and let her film, while I only took a little footage.

We hit the strand, and decided to walk over to the left, to see if we’d missed any of it. In fact, we’d missed a whole bay.

There was a lot going on – check out Marisa’s video below, mine is coming in later weeks. The beach had dozens of people, and in the background you could bunch of people kite-surfing. It was a really active place, as it turns out. Turning back towards the village after having done enough gawking (I always feel awkward snapping and taking video where I am fully clothed and the majority of the people are not), we saw there was a really cute outdoor craft market underway.

We had a good look at the life in that little mini-village, and I bought a steampunk fishy thing, made out of coastal flotsam – there was a whole stall dedicated to that! Marisa has better Italian, sounding naturalised (to me, anyway!), and was chatting away with the locals. It turns out, that rather than this market being a once-off, this was its prototype and test, in the hope that it would continue at least throughout the summer. She also chatted with some casual restaurateurs who would cook whatever fish was extracted by Vada’s fishermen same-day. It would have been tempting, but we had already eaten. Everyone was so lovely – as Italians generally are if you should genuine interest in their locality.

We took my booty back to the car, and walked back the 30 or so meters to Gelateria La Dogana for refreshment. In a rare moment, I skipped having gelato, settling instead for an ice cold diet Lemon Soda (hard to find!). The ladies enjoyed their gelato.

We decided the day wasn’t done yet, as we were having too good a time. So, we took Marisa to see Casale Marittimo. It’s my favourite village in Tuscany (so far), purely for street layout and architecture, and it usually blows guests out of their socks when they explore it.

I’ve already written a lot about Casale… you can do a search for all the blogs on this site. I think this was the only time we visited it this year, though. And it’s always fun showing people about if for the first time. It’s so layer-caked, hodge-podge and higgledy-piggledy… clean and frequently quiet. It’s a hilltown haven, only 15 minutes from the relative bustle of Cecina.

The leather worker here was sadly closed today

Marisa was delighted and was taking a lot of footage as we explored. We started at the highest part of town and worked our way down to the main square. There was more to explore on a lower level, where you can see down the coastal plains near to the Maremma. However, it was beginning to get late, and it was going to take us about an hour to get Marisa home, plus another 45 minutes to get us home.

So we headed back towards the carpark, only to pass by a bar that was closed last time we were there. However, it was open, and it was the most extraordinary mish-mashe of bar, perfumery and boutique/accessory store. We needed some refreshment, so we ducked inside and were amazed by it. It is called MADAMA caféshop, and it looks like it only opens seasonally.

The bathrooms were exquisitely decorated too!

We spent about 45 minutes there and then walked to the car and had a lovely drive back to Chianni, via Saline di Volterra and the lovely rolling hills of the Val di Cecina.

Have a look at Marisa’s video for a review of our day!

We said goodbye to Marisa and drove home. I’m almost certain that we didn’t go straight back to the apartment, but instead hung around for a free table at La Mangiatoia. It’s one of a few places in Volterra that focuses on pizza and they’re always so nice to us when we’re there. However, you cannot book a table there. You rockup, and you get a table or not – and if you don’t, you can either queue or leave. We queued, with beers, and they brough out a chair for us to use as a table for our drinks, bless them.

Yes. it’s sliced hodog – wuerstel. And it’s yum.

We were destroyed and went back to bed after getting home. Thanks for reading… please let me know if you have any questions or comments!

Spring Finale with a Coastal Trip to San Vincenzo (31/03-02/04/2023)

While not particularly verbose, this blog is chunky with photos – fair warning!

Well, they say all good Springs must come to an end (not apologising for that one), and so it was with this pre-Easter stay. This blog covers our last 2.5 days, during which we only did one new thing of note: visit a coastal town in which a local friend has a home away from home. However, on the first day – evening to be precise – something interesting happened. Read on!

Well it began one of those days I think I have described before as a ‘living’ day – a holiday, but spent as a day practicing living as an everyday citizen, rather than doing anything special. Could I tell you exactly what we did up to our dinner out? Well, I had gelato and Niamh made some cacio e pepe. So, there we go!

That evening we did go out to dinner, as we knew it was one of our last nights and we didn’t want to manually wash everything. Ok, so there was *some* recognition that we were on holiday. We went to the place beside us, Porgi l’Altra Pancia for a good dinner.

We left happy, as always. We decided to walk to burn off the calories. We walked towards the road above the Roman Theatre ruins, and it was then that we noted that there was an unusual quality to the atmosphere that night.

We saw the red light was in the direction of Piazza dei Priori, so we walked towards it, taking snaps along the way.

The cloud level had descended to just above the town itself, and so the fog bank was acting as a canvas to the medium of the city lights. I can’t say with 100% certainly that the lights were purposely switched to red because of the low cloud, but I would put good money on it that they were.

We wandered up to the square and it was magic. It was also spooky – like a movie set.

Very cool. We wondered what it was like from the main panoramic viewpoint and it got even spookier!

I’m surprised I got any sleep!

Anyway, the next day we vowed we’d get out of the apartment and try to do something new, weather permitting. But I had to take care of a couple of things beforehand. Firstly, there was the matter of my walk. I walked around the back of Piazza XX Settembre, which is something I don’t do often enough. At least some of the photos I take are from scenes rarely seen in this blog.

It was also a market day, and on top of that there was the Ladies’ Crafts market *AND* it was the spring edition of Volterragusto. More on these later and in the video faaaar below.

Goodness me! How did that sneak in there?

We left the town in the late morning and drove to San Vicenzo. We parked probably too far away from the town, and so I won’t link where we parked here – you should be able to do a better job yourself! When we got out of the car, we discovered we were on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. We took a little underpass to cross the tracks.

San Vincenzo is a lovely little town, with some pedestrian zones with shops, eateries and bars – and also a lovely marina promenade. Today was very quiet. Or would have been had it not been for the roaring wind. It was exceedingly blustery out – very handy if you want to cool down, but we were already in the off-season. At least it was a dry day, with a largely blue sky. I couldn’t ask for much more, given the time of year. We just took a little stroll (filmed rather than photographed – see video below), before we stopped to look for a place for lunch. Many of them were closed, but we did find a place whose food we really enjoyed: Osteria Christian’s. They had a lovely little… well, I can’t call it an amuse bouche, as it was quite large – but it was a shared place of couscous with cold veggies. It was really tasty and refreshing – I bet it would be a wonderful way to start a meal in the heat of summer.

Afterwards, we retook to the streets and had a blowy look at the strand. The wind was powerful. Clustered on the sand were little puffy balls of air, which may have once contained something, but were now empty. Maybe seed-pods of some kind – I’m not sure. You’ll see them on the video a bit below, about 5m 10s in. What are they?! I think they’re in the bottom right corner of the first pic here.

We went back up the town and then decided to take the marina promenade. It was really lovely around here, I have to say. The sky was clear blue, and because of the time of the year, there weren’t too many people around.

Upon walking back inland to return to the car, we noticed that there were about 3 or 4 gelaterie were open, and I could have gotten my fix there today instead. Not many other shops were open, however – just a couple of restaurants, bars and those gelato stores!

When we got home, rather than returning immediately to the apartment, we had a walk about the indoor Volterragusto stalls. Lots on offer here…. truffle products, beer, salumi, cheeses, wines, pasta… I bought a couple of truffle-based condiments/spreads and we each got a beer; me a stout, and Niamh an IPA. They were nice enough.

Lavender dude – we got something from him later in the year

We didn’t hang around, as we wanted to get a little rest in before heading out for a bit of food. Now, here’s a shame that’s on me: I am not 100% sure where the heck we went for food! The carbonara below very much reminds me of Torre del Porcellino‘s style, as do the tablecloths, but I didn’t think they’d have been open yet, and I could have sworn we finished off the year somehow without going into them. For no good reason – the food is nice there! Maybe I misremember, and it was indeed Torre. Now that I’ve re-looked at the video – I really *was* Torre! Lol! I think I owe Niamh some money!

Here’s a video of the day – enjoy!

Afterwards, we wrapped up the night – our final of this stay – with a stroll.

And to bed for the last time this holiday.

We did have half a day this time around, so we could walk, have lunch at Don Beta… grab a little you-know-what from L’Isola del Gusto – which was the very last thing we did that holiday.