We are leaving Siena today and heading to Orvieto. After Cinque Terre we traveled to Lucca. It's a moderately charming medium sized city with a very old completely intact city wall. The best part of our visit to Lucca was renting bikes and riding on the ramparts for an hour. It was quite invigorating. The rest of the time we walked around the city and enjoyed seeing some of the old architecture. That night we grabbed dinner and I had what was essentially the pork steak with roasted potatoes. If I was a food critic and knew colorful ways to describe tastes I do so now, but I am not and my description of this pork chop will not do it justice. I will say that it was the most delicious piece of meat I have every had. The herbs used to season this steak were perfect and fresh, but not overwhelming and didn't dominate the flavor.
However, overall Lucca was not everything we had hoped it would be. It was obvious that there were many fewer tourists there, which we liked, but we found that the tourist information office didn't keep their posted hours and was closed. This, compounded with a recent and confusing change in how bus tickets are bought, resulted in us missing our bus to our next destination, Pisa, and left us (me more than Leslie) irked by Lucca.
Our arrival in Pisa was short, but nice. We saw the leaning tower, field of miracles, duomo and bapistry. However, since Pisa was only intended to be a short stop on our way to our next destination we had all our luggage with us and so we didn't bother going into any of these sights. We took a few good photos, included a perspective shot of Leslie preventing the Leaning Tower of Pisa from falling over, and headed to the train station.
We arrived in Siena and checked into our room. The view is amazing, which will be evident when I post photos. We saw their Duomo, another of many massive and ornate Italian churches, and ate gelatto on Il Campo, a massive piazza. Overall, Siena was quite lovely.
The next day, yesterday, we went to Montalcino. It's a small town on top of a large hill in Tuscany known for their Brunello and Rosso di Montalcino wines. The wines were quite good, although my Brunello was a bit too bitter and almost medicinal to me. That's unfortunate because our tour book notes how good the Brunello is. I think I just shouldn't have sprung for the cheapest Brunello. However, I really liked the Rosso di Montalcino. Montalcino is pretty small and we started to run out of things to do. That's not the worst problem to have, so we took a short nap on a bench overlooking miles upon miles of Tuscany.
I don't know if I'll update from Orvieto, or again on this trip. I think I will try to post a overview of our trip when we get home.
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