Christmas in Tuscany, Part 4

Now that it's almost Easter, here is the final installment of the Christmas trip report!!

For New Year's Eve we planned to visit Montalcino and Siena. Montepulciano and Montalcino are the two wine-lovers' towns. Montepulciano has the Vino Nobile, which we had tasted a few days before and enjoyed a lot. Montalcino has the famous (and expensive) Brunello wine ("little Brunette"). We only went to one tasting facility in Montalcino due to time and expense, but I am finding now that we are back in Berlin that, now that I know what to look for, I sometimes see Brunello and Vino Nobile wines in the stores here and we can try them here at home.

We went to a very interesting automated tasting facility.  There were long rows of wine bottles displayed in a stainless steel casing, like a vending machine. Each bottle had a spigot in front of it and a digital price displayed above it. When you enter the Enoteca, you check in and get a tracking chip. You browse the rows of wine and when you find one you would like to try, you insert your chip in the slot closest to the group of bottles that contains the one you want to try. (The slot is below the green display area in the picture.) Then you place your wine glass under your wine bottle's spigot and press a button to dispense. Wine pours out in just the right amount for a tasting. The price of the tasting is noted on your chip, which you pull out of the slot and move on to the next wine you want to try. It was a really interesting way to try wine. Typically when we go wine tasting we go to a particular winery that sells only its own wine. Since we were in a hurry to get to Siena, it worked well to go to one place that sold wine from many different wineries. The choices were daunting though, and part of the appeal of a wine-tasting is speaking with someone who is knowledgeable about the wine who can suggest varieties based on your particular tastes. Thankfully there was a nice English-speaking man available in this shop who selected 5 or 6 very different types of wine for us to get a representative sample.

You could quickly go broke tasting Brunello like this. It's a very expensive wine and each taste cost anywhere between €4 and €12. Each taste, not each glass! Another downside of this tasting method is that it's not possible to benefit from a generous pour of wine; each sample is measured to the same specific amount. No fun. Anyway, we actually didn't like the wines we tasted very much, with the exception of a €100+ bottle we tasted just for fun. Of course, we thought that one was excellent.

There's not much to do in Montalcino besides taste wine, plus we wanted to get on to Siena, so we didn't stay too long in that town.

This peaceful park on the edge of Montalcino boasts
benches and amazing views

The Enoteca where we tasted Brunello di Montalcino

Montalcino's main attraction is its fortress, now empty on the
inside but all the walls and towers and ramparts still stand.
Sometimes they host festivals and events inside.

Just beside the fortress and with a spectacular view into the
valley was a small Christmas market

Palazzo Publico and Torre del Mangia lit up at night,
with the stage for New Year's Eve bands in front

Siena is sort of the grand jewel of the hill towns, the largest and most famous. It seems like everyone who has been to Siena has loved it, so we had great expectations for enjoying the rest of the day and possibly into the night to pass the new year. Well, of course with those high hopes we were bound to be disappointed. Probably it was partly because we saw Siena at the end of a week of seeing other hill towns and we were "hill-towned-out". But probably even more it was because Dan's and my tastes are just not the norm. If there is a crowd you can generally find us heading in the opposite direction to find a place with more solitude. So we were immediately repulsed by the crowds in Siena. There were so many more people there than had been anywhere else we had visited. Just another indication that had we done this same trip itinerary in the summertime we would probably have had a miserable time.

Unidentified sausages and salamis hang
from the window of the delicatessen
where we bought sandwiches

Another factor that soured our impression of Siena was faulty planning. In general I was really pleased with how our entire visit to Tuscany had gone: arriving with a general idea of what I wanted us to do and then leaving the details and particulars to spontaneity. But I botched our new year's eve. We didn't eat in Montalcino and so we were pretty starving when we arrived in Siena. But restaurants in Italy usually take a break between lunch and dinner, so there was no place that was open to sit down and have a meal, plus it got dark pretty early and we didn't want to take the time to have a long meal so we could tour the city in the daytime. So we bought sandwiches from a super authentic local meat guy whose shop had sausages and other dried meats hanging from the window. But nobody liked their food very much. The meats had a very strong taste, and the kids didn't like the fresh cheese on the sandwiches. We also paid way too much for a wheel of panforte, the special Italian Christmas dessert made with densely packed fruits and nuts, which we ended up not liking very much. With so much wonderful food in Italy, I was so bummed every time we ate something that we didn't enjoy, it seemed like such a lost opportunity!

Siena's Duomo

After an unsatisfying meal and wandering a little around Siena, thinking it was too big and kind of impersonal, we bought tickets to tour the Duomo. This I enjoyed very much. It was beautiful on the inside and I enjoyed having the guide book with me and seeking out all the interesting parts of the church.

The cathedral's interior

Piazza del Campo, the huge public space in the center of Siena
where the Palio horse race is run in the summertime

After getting kicked out of the church because it was closing, we came outside to a rapidly chilling night, even though it was only early evening. We came to the realization that we had nowhere to go and nothing to do. We had no hotel to relax in. Museums and attractions had closed for the holiday evening. Restaurants weren't open yet, and when they did open they would be fully booked with reserved tables. The New Year's Eve entertainment in Piazza del Campo wouldn't start until 10 p.m. Our only option seemed to be killing 3 or 4 hours drinking coffee or wine somewhere until the festivities started, which sounded pretty good to me but not to the kids. It was too cold to stay outside, and we weren't even sure where we could go inside because many of the wine shops simply sell you a bottle and a couple of plastic cups and send you on your way. Understandably the kids were beginning to act up in this situation and Dan and I were frustrated by our failed day, so tempers flared and Dan ended up getting really mad at Carter and hurting his feelings, so much so that he wouldn't speak to us the rest of the night. Sigh. Had I known what our plans for the week would be, I should have booked us a room in Siena, booked us a nice restaurant for dinner, and we would have done the whole thing differently. But I couldn't have known that; we had never planned to spend New Year's Eve in Siena, it just happened organically. So in the end we decided to leave Siena before the big evening celebration and we drove back to Chianciano Terme, each one of us silent and disappointed. I would like to give Siena another chance sometime.

Monica had graciously invited us to have a new year's eve meal with her extended family. We had gotten to know her from quite a bit of visiting over breakfasts throughout the week. We had talked a lot about parenting, since she is in a difficult stage right now with a small baby and a very feisty toddler boy. She had gotten to know us too. She made a chocolate cake for breakfast one morning to please Carter. And when she found out I was sick she went straight to her yard and pulled some plant from the ground and made me a tea with its leaves and roots and some fresh lemon. We got to see the real woman behind the face of the bed and breakfast, and we were honored that she would invite us to a meal. We weren't sure, though, if anyone in her family but Monica spoke English, and we also had thought maybe we would stay in Siena for fireworks and music. So we had told her that we wouldn't have dinner but that if we got back in town at an early enough hour, we would knock on her door and have a new year's toast.

When we returned from Siena we left the kids in our apartment for some decompression time and Dan and I walked across the street to wish Monica a happy new year. We were welcomed with open arms, given drinks and offered lasagna. Her relatives all had small children so the scene was a familiar one from our not too distant past: a cartoon playing on the tv, toddlers getting into things they shouldn't be, parents trying to have conversations while being climbed on, etc. One cute little girl I had seen at breakfast came over to me with a toy bin and proceeded to empty the bin and show me each one. I "whooshed" a toy car down her arm and she was so thrilled that she must have handed the car to me again and again 25 times before her mom came over and rescued me. It was a happy domestic scene and I mostly just watched everyone and played a little with the kids. Dan found someone who spoke English and had an animated conversation about a wide range of topics from video games to movies. After a little while we excused ourselves and went back to our apartment. I didn't really see the point in staying up, so I went on to bed. It's the first time in many years that I haven't stayed awake until midnight to ring in the new year. Dan and the kids stayed up and at midnight they walked outside and caught a glimpse of fireworks going off somewhere.

New Year's Day dawned as a new start. When I originally planned this trip I had hoped that if the weather was nice enough we could go biking or hiking since so many summertime trips are planned around those activities. This, our last day in Tuscany, promised to be relatively warm and sunny, so we decided to go for a walk/hike. Monica cooked up a wonderful breakfast, as always, and we pored over internet boards and maps to choose a destination for our walk. Monica suggested a lovely walk through a forest to a hilltop viewpoint, but since it was a nice sunny day we decided we would rather be out in the sun, so we settled on walking part of the highly recommended route between Monticchiello and Pienza. We had to be back in Chianciano Terme by 3:00 because we had made reservations for a New Year's meal at one of the nicest restaurants in town, one we had been trying to get to all week.

We drove to Montichiello, not far away, and were immediately struck by how picturesque it was. It is tiny, so it only took us a few minutes to walk around the town, but it was very scenic. There was a cozy trattoria just inside the town wall that was serving food on the holiday. The man in the tiny visitors shop told me that there would be a drum performance later that evening. It was decision time: do we take a short walk and then hurry back to Chianciano Terme in time for our afternoon lunch reservation, or do we cancel the reservation, take a more leisurely walk and spend the day in Monticchiello? Once I make a plan I like to stick to it, but we really were drawn in by cute and cozy Monticchiello. We decided to cancel the reservation but the only problem was language. Almost no one at restaurants in this part of Italy speaks English (Monica had made the reservation for us). I used Google translate to change "My name is Jennifer Cripe. I have a reservation for 4 people at 3:00. I would like to cancel it. Our plans have changed. Thank you. Goodbye." into Italian. I practiced it several times, then took a deep breath and dialed the number. I made it through my speech and the man on the other end of the line seemed to understand what I was saying, at least enough to questioningly repeat the word "cancel" in Italian. "Si, annulare" I said. Whew, I did it! We put our name on the list at the restaurant in Monticchiello and took off on our walk.

It was genuinely lovely, one of the highlights of our trip. All was forgiven and we walked and laughed and took goofy pictures, throwing a frisbee back and forth as we walked. All too soon it was time to turn around so we could get back to the restaurant before it closed.

See the frisbee in the air between Haley and me?

Monticchiello up on the hill

It turns out that even though we had put our name down for a specific time, our table wasn't ready when we returned and in fact we waited probably close to an hour for it. But no matter, the food was good and we eventually sat down to a nice celebratory meal.

After dinner it had gotten dark and the drum performance started in the main square. It was a group from Africa and they drummed and chanted in front of a large bonfire. It was a cool small community celebration - all ages were singing along, tapping their feet, or dancing. Someone was selling hot spiced wine and hot chocolate for a small fee from their own drink dispenser. It felt like a very worldly new year's celebration: Americans in Italy listening to a performance from Africa.

We spent our final night at the bed and breakfast and the next morning had our last yummy Monica breakfast, then crammed into our rental car one last time and drove back to Florence. It was a rainy, yucky day and we couldn't see any scenery through the clouds, fog and rain. It really made us realize what a different trip we would have had if the weather had been like that the whole time! Thank goodness it was only for the travel day. We all agreed this was one of our favorite European trips so far.