Siena day 3 / Volterra / Florence day 1

Observation: Americans are more uptight than Italians; this is a blessing when you're driving.

We got up and had the hotel breakfast, which turns out to be included in the room fee. The breakfast room was down the hall, turn left, down the hall, turn left, down the hall, left, right, and there you are. It had two brick vaults in it and was rather cozy. It was a pretty full breakfast buffet, except no meats or cheeses. There was bread, breakfast cereal, yogurt, orange and tangerine juices, assorted goodies, plus hot milk, coffee, and tea. The coffee was not great. Still, it was good to eat.

We packed up our stuff and left our bags in the luggage room as we went to shop a little more. The hat shop was not open, but we did stop at a linens-and-olive-wood shop (where the linens were signed “Bertozzi”), and bought some printed linens, and we stopped at a print shop we'd seen and bought ourselves an etching of a Fiat 500 (a portrait, really).

The we picked up our bags and headed out of town. We thought it would be nice to stop somewhere along the way, and we decided to visit Volterra. It sounded appealing and new, which it was. It's also a bit remote, requiring a lot of driving along windy roads through hills. The ride made me a bit carsick, but eventually we got there and stowed the car in a pay garage (free lots were full).

Volterra sits atop a high hill among high hills. The city is surrounded by a medieval wall, which is in turn surrounded by an ancient Etruscan art. The views are spectacular.

Lunch was at a restaurant called Don Beta; I had tortello de ricotta e spinaci in a boar sauce, followed by cinghiale alla maremmana, boar chunks stewed with olives. The tortelli were nothing special, but the boar alla maremmana was delicious. As a side salad I had the green salad, which was curly endive, chopped, served with a very good extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and salt and pepper. The bitter endive was an excellent counterpoint to the vinegar. Eric has a degustazione di pecorino, about 7 kinds of ewe's milk cheese, served with mostarda – in this case, three little sauce boats, one of honey, one of a sort of pepper jelly, and one of a sort of balsamic vinegar jelly. The balsamic vinegar mostarda was the best, and the cheese were nearly all lovely. His second dish was papardelle in a boar sauce, and it was also very good. He had an arugula salad to go with it. We had a bottle of house red, which featured a caricature of the proprietor being cooked on a spit.

After lunch we wandered a bit and took in the sights. It's a charming town, if perhaps over-touristed.

After walking, we had some gelato and went on our way. (There was some drama on the way out; we stopped at the cashier to pay, and he told us, €3. But when our car reached the checkout machine, the readout said “tempo scaduto”, and to go back to the cashier. He came out, took our card and went in, and said we'd paid the wrong amount; it was €6. So we paid another 3 and went on our way. But in the meantime we held up traffic.)

Getting to Florence after that was easy, but getting around Florence was not. We took a wrong turn (my fault) on the way in, and ended up on the wrong side of town. Central Florence is entirely pedestrianized, and the best thing to do is go around it; but without a large enough map, we didn't know how to do that. We floundered here and there for a while and eventually ended up leaving the way we came, taking the correct turn, following our twisty-turny instructions from Google Maps, and making it to our hotel – at which point we had to figure out where to park. (The hotel has parking.) Eric ran in to ask, while I waited outside (pulling over a few yards ahead to allow other cars to pass). The instructions on how to get around the block were at least as convoluted as Google's, but we made it. Then we had to turn the car down a narrow passage off a narrow street, which involved shimmying the car back and forth in a slow rotation, till we could make it down the passage. This would have been easier if the pedestrians had stopped, instead of continuing to walk around the car, as they did until there was really no space for a person to pass.

Pulling through the archway, we drove into a lovely courtyard (which our room looks onto), and parked near a very large tree.

The hotel is charming and whimsical, with stenciled vines around the washstand, and a detail of two bored-looking cherubs (from a famous painting by Rafael) overlooking the bed.

We headed out to see the town. Central Florence is not medieval, unlike Siena or Volterra. I don't know the exact history, but the central area was clearly remade. (Was there an earthquake, like in Lisbon? Or was the land seized by imminent domain, as in Paris?) The avenues are fairly broad (though pedestrianized), the streets largely straight and at right angles to each other, the buildings (aside from special ones like the Uffizi) are rather standardized. The tourist quality of the city is (as always) a bit depressing – too clean, too much high-end shopping – but it is clearly also a real city where real people live and work. We arrived too late today for the passagiata; if I see that tomorrow, this place will seem more real.

Supper took a while to find, as we went past a recommended place, kept walking, went in a wide circuit, and ended up at the same place. The problem was we wanted something light, and didn't want to be obligated to have a full meal. Other options in town tend to be pizzerias and self-service snack bars. The place we went to (Cantinetta dei Verrazzano) had a self-service counter, but also had a wine-bar attached, with table service. It's owned by the Chianti house of Verrazzano, so they only serve their own wine. We shared a bottle of chianti, and Eric had some bresaola with arugula and lemon zest, and I had an open-faced sandwich of sopressata with lemon zest and pepper. Apparently in Florence sopressata is something close to head cheese; disturbing but pretty tasty. The bresaola was lovely as it always is. That didn't feel like quite enough food, so we let him bring us an assortment of stuffed focaccia, which were very tasty. It was also just a little too much food, which wasn't too surprising once we realized he'd brought us not two but four servings of it. The wine was brought to the table with great ceremony, and was good but not all that special.

Our waiter was funny. His English was excellent; almost completely unaccented. It turned out (the table behind asked) he's half American – born and raised in Florence, but he spent his summers in Massachusetts (his grandmother teaches at Smith, he said, but then he said he spent his time around Harvard). He was a bit overly jocular, frankly – I do like to be left alone – but still it was fun. I'd thought he must have spent some time in the US, but I also thought he must have been surrounded by Italians; his accent is virtually perfect, but his idiom is off: he frequently used translated Italian phrases or cognates in place of a more standard term. The grapes are “elevated” rather than “raised”, plus another better example that escapes me now. (It was something where the meaning was clear, but it was not an English idiom.)

Then, though it was not late, we headed back to the hotel (albeit by a meandering route). We are both tired.

Labels: food, italy, journal, personal

posted by Tony at 4:23 PM