Tuscany

As the wedding was at Shanti's home near Manciano in southern Tuscany, we made the second half of the holiday the country half.  We stayed a few kilometres further down the road from Manciano, at an agriturismo called Montarlese.  What a fabulous place to relax it was.  A breezy hilltop, surrounded by the colours of Tuscany, with hammocks in the trees and a swimming pool, Carlo providing a breakfast of homemade bread, jams and yoghurt, and other produce barely less local, with the offer of sampling his olive oil and wine (although stocks had sadly run dry of the wine).  I'll happily enthuse about the place at length, we managed to find it relaxing even with a Thomas and a Marisca, and can only imagine how peacful it would have been had we not been there!

Sunday evening, after a day at the beach, and we went to see Manciano.  One of the many hilltop towns and villages that populate that part of the country, I'm sure it'd not the most beautiful yet we loved winding our way up and up and up to the church and castle at the very top of the hill.  And then wandering down to find dinner (yes, pizza) at a place so crowded with locals we knew it'd be good.  And then an ice cream, where the proprietor was so disappointed for Tom that we weren't buying him one that he got a teeny tiny one for free.

On Monday we had a relaxing morning and then drove up further into the mountains to a sculpture park.  Not dissimilar to our own Yorkshire Sculpture Park but with a much higher concentration of exhibits.  We love seeing this kind of art in a natural environment.  The eagle eyed will spot the grey sky - it was the hottest day of the summer in much of Italy, which made for thunder storms up in the hills.  Elspeth and I welcomed the cooler day, but Marisca didn't much enjoy the thunder.  That was all forgotten when we made our way to the sound sculpture where Risky gave the thunder a good run for its decibels.  She had so much fun with that one - see below.

We drove back by the less wiggly roads to save my sanity from the constant left-right-left-right of the 2 hour mountain drive over there.  This meant we had a choice of places to stop for tea, and ended up in Magliano In Toscana, another beautiful town.  Magliano has a great feel and is more touristy than Manciano, making good use of the charms of its fortified walls and town square.  We ate dinner (pasta!) and Marsica made friends with a couple of Italians pre-schoolers, running round and round the square like idiots.  We eventually drew her away by offering ice cream.  

On our last day we visited Pitigliano, billed as the prettiest town thereabouts.  And well billed - in a region of amazing towns perched on hilltops, Pitigliano outshines all the others we say with the way in which it seems to cling to the rocks.  We enjoyed wandering through the windy streets and actually-quite-nice tourist shops, visiting the synagogue and the church, having a really really great pasta lunch, enjoying the cool nooks, the ancient caves, the views over the valleys and the tiny stepped alleyways that seemed to plunge over the cliff edges.  

We finished the day with an early bed time for the children (when did I start regarding 8pm as early?  Perhaps when they were still up at midnight on the wedding night, or the usual 10pm on other days...), after one last trip for ice cream to Manciano.  They both fell asleep early and Elspeth and I shared a bottle of wine outside as the sun went down, enjoying the last gasps of the holiday before planning for the trip to the airport the next day.

Everyone said we'd love Tuscany and we didn't particularly believe them.  But yes, we did.  I'd have happily stayed another week and still not got as far as Siena, let alone Florence or Pisa, there's just so much to slow down and enjoy about the Maremma region. Elspeth talks about how Italians would just stop us on the street to express their joy at seeing our children.  And I just loved the colours.  Childhood trips to Greece are remembered as brown and dusty, but this part of the Mediterranean is all greens, yellows, browns, blue skies and red roofs.  If we come back here I'm negotiating time with just me and my camera: this time around, I'm content with a few grabbed images to remind me of the place.