Italian bathrooms tend to be different from other European bathrooms I’ve seen. Many have an old-fashioned tank on the wall above your head with a string to pull or a metal rod to push up for flushing. Public and restaurant bathrooms have foot pedals for controlling the sink water. That’s a smarter way to do it since it’s hands-free and you keep your hands clean!
We met another Canadian couple staying at our B&B last night. Barry and Sharon are from Calgary on a three-week trip to the Tuscan region (based out of here, San Gimignano, with day trips from here) and Umbria (next region over from Tuscany.) It’s truly a small world (again) because I can count on one hand the number of rail engineers I’ve ever met because it’s such a small field in the US, and Barry is a rail engineer! He works for a contracting company, the Canadian branch of AE Comm. We only got a chance to chat briefly but naturally C wants to get to know him a little better. They’re here for a week too but tomorrow is our last day. We know this much – he’s like a lot of other engineering contractors because his wife said each day in Tuscany was slowly weening him off of his Crackberry.
We had nothing but local specialties when we ate out for lunch in Volterra! I think we’ve finally fulfilled our duty of eating local food somewhere in Italy. I had risotto al “Pozzo degli Etruschi” (well of the Etruscans, the restaurant namesake), an exotic and tasty concoction of rice (risotto) with some kind of meat bits, maybe ham, eggplant, some unidentified vegetable, and spicy olive oil coating. My appetizer was Zuppa alla Volerrana (Volterran soup), which was kind of like [real Italian] minestrone soup, something C had already tried and loved in Siena. This veggie soup was thicker than the minestrone and had bread pieces in it. A salad I had the other night at dinner had bread pieces in it too. I noticed the bread accompanying meals in Italy tends to be very bland with little salt unlike the tasty French bread. The Italian bread is softer and more moist thought, so you give and take :-p C had a dish called penne all’ etrusca at lunch, which was basically penne pasta with that omnipresent bolognese sauce on it. To top off our last meal out in Italy, we finally tried real tiramisu, not the imitation gelato flavor. It was worth the wait. Even C who hates everything coffee loved and devoured it. I don’t think it lasted much longer than a couple minutes on our table! It was the best tiramisu I’ve ever had – creamy but not too heavy, an ever subtle coffee flavor, and the mildest liqueur I’ve tasted in a tiramisu. A perfect balance. I have to learn how to make that!
Restaurants here serve reasonable portions. Sometimes the meal can be large simply because you order too many courses, but the individual courses are well-portioned. C and I eat most or all of our main dishes routinely without getting overly full. If we tried to eat out frequently in the US and eat entire portions every time, we would be miserable people. We Americans need to stop serving – and eating – these outrageous restaurant meals. We’re all guilty for wasting the food whether we throw it away or eat a couple servings too many and feed an unhealthy lifestyle.
Volterra is known for alabaster carvings, art, plates, etc. The stone is uniquely beautiful and soft-translucent white. The most incredible part is that Volterrans have been carving and selling alabaster for hundreds of years since before Medieval times. The town is much more lively than Lucca and San Gimignano since it has a sizable local population, not just day trippers. With more locals and a lot less tourists, there were many more practical shops and restaurants that didn’t just cater to tourists. What a breath of fresh air!
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Today, we went on another day trip to a famous Tuscan town, Volterra. Like the name suggest, this place is perched high on a tall hill with a commanding view of everything around it. We left the apartment at 0800 and walked through the nearly deserted streets of San Gimignano to but bus tickets at a Tabacchi shop. We tried the tourist office too but they were closed. The bus showed up at 0850 and we got off at another town past Poggibonsi called Colle Val d’Else to transfer to another bus. During the layover, we bought tickets for the 2nd bus at a magazine shop beside the bus stop. This service ran under the province of Pisa instead of Siena, like all the other buses we have been on, so we couldn’t but tickets with the rest. The road to Volterra was incredibly curvy and after a long steep ascent, we were dropped off at the edge of town. We stopped by the tourist office to get a map, and then went over to see the ruins of the roman theater on the north side of town, which was very interesting from the high viewing area. The shops selling Alabaster art were everywhere, so we checked out a few of these while wandering about. Eventually, we ended up in the public park and then back over to the main piazza looking for food. Restaurants were plentiful, unlike Lucca, so it was more of an issue of finding one we liked. We sat down at a two-person table in a narrow alley, part of a restaurant called Pozzi dalle Etrusci (something like that). We probably should have sat inside because of the cool, drizzly weather, but the food made it interesting. I had some grilled vegetables with Penne all’Etrusci and B had a veggie soup and risotto with some interesting stuff in it. We splurged and finished the meal with an awesome tiramisu. Back to wandering, we went out the west gage and meandered around the ‘real’ Volterra in the rain for about 45 minutes. We went as far as the 17th century church then turned around. Next, we checked out the absolutely opulent Palazzo Viti, a palace still occupied by the Viti family but with one floor open to visitors. It amounted to a museum of rare paintings and furniture, but was fascinating nonetheless, and worth the 5 EUR/person entry cost. We then found our way to the fountain at the wall on the north side of town, which was about a million steps down from the main street. By 1700, we were back at the bus stop and got on the bus at 1720. We sat in the first row behind the driver, and it was fun to watch all the peds and cars scurrying to get out of the way. The layover in Colle was about 40 minutes, and the bus dropped us off at the south end of San Gimignano by surprise. ‘St Lucia’ the bus driver said was his next destination, opposite of ours, oh well. We walked home in the rain, getting some veggies from the market along the way. Dinner was in the apartment, that tiny pasta again with pepper, tomato, and some luncheon meat on top to round it off. It’s supposed to rain more tomorrow, so I’m not sure what we will do!
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The Song of Serendipity 