Tuscany has so much to offer. We spent a week driving through the region known for natural beauty, wine and olives, great food, historic towns and famous art.
Tuscany's beauty struck us immediately. The endless rolling hills are a patchwork of lush green fields (reminiscent of Ireland but with bigger hills, although it may only have been green because we were there in spring), vineyards, olive groves and forests. Stone farmhouses, hundreds of years old but beautifully restored, dot the landscape. Everywhere you go there are adorable, medieval and renaissance hill towns made out of stone. Almost all of the dwellings, hundreds of years old, are well maintained and cared for with personal touches like potted plants and shrines. It's a testament to the homeowner's patience, respect for the past and love of beauty that they prefer antique dwellings over modern comforts.
Food and wine take center stage in Tuscany. Wine tasting opportunities abound (we didn't do much), especially in the Chianti region. Restaurants feature wild game, especially wild boar; tender, slow cooked meats; fresh bean dishes; and of course delicious pastas. Tuscan restaurants know how to do meat (we don't like the meat dishes we've had in Italian restaurants in general, so this impressed us). The Tuscans are also very proud of their olive oil and use it as a simple dressing for salad, beans and bread (I failed to appreciate/get excited about fine olive oil in general, but there are clearly some people out there who get something I don't.).
Florence is the biggest and most historically important town in Tuscany. It was the base of the Medici family who funded a great deal of Renaissance art, and it's a highlight for art lovers. The Uffizi gallery in Florence is the most important gallery in Italy (according to our guide book, although Steve and I don't know enough about art to judge), and Michelangelo's David is also located in Florence. We really enjoyed both, with the help of a Rick Steve's guide with some great background on a variety of paintings and sculptures. We literally had no idea about art or any capacity to appreciate it prior to our museum visits in Florence. The city will probably always have a special place in my heart because now I am a sophisticate, whereas before I was just a crude American. (Note that the preceding passage has a healthy dose of sarcasm. We've gone to art museums before; we just usually get bored quickly.)
Great pictures! I almost missed the second set that you took in Florence. No wonder you didn't usually like the meat. It must have taken a master chef in Tuscany to make you forget what meat looked like in the stores.
ReplyDeleteBTW, you need to ask Aaron and Jess about their hotel in Ronda (Andalucia) which resembled your pictures in that it too was built into a cliff. Another place for you to visit.
Dianne
Beautiful landscapes and aesthetically pleasing towns. Tuscany looks like a wonderful place to visit. Is it as sparsely populated as it seems in your pictures? A lot of your pictures reminded me of villages and small towns in some areas of Spain, where many of the nicest looking old houses are the vacation homes of people who were born there but now live and work in cities.
ReplyDeleteTuscany seemed really sparsely populated. There were lots of nicely maintained but empty houses. The towns were dead, even in the morning and late afternoon. I think you're right - the houses were probably maintained by people who lived in cities and came to their hometown on weekends.
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