How did we end up in Tuscany?

Go back to June, 2024. We were attending a charity event for Autism that had a silent auction. I like to help out by opening up the bids on some of the items, and we entered the starting bid on four vacation packages, and it turned out that nobody else bid on any of them. One was a week at a villa in Italy, but when I went to arrange for it, that particular villa was booked for the next three years. The company said that they had a marvelous villa in Tuscany that had availability in September 2025, so we snatched that up.

View from the pool of our Villa:

Our villa was just outside of Cortona, and it turned out to be a half kilometer away from Bramasole, the villa featured in the book and movie, Under the Tuscan Sun.

Bramasole:

And here is the view from Bramasole:

The villa could host six people, and we went with my wife’s youngest brother, his wife, my wife’s aunt, and he sister (whose husband had passed away after a long illness six weeks before).

In case you are thinking of visiting the area, it is drop dead gorgeous, is the center of world class wines (Montepulciano, Chianti, Brunello), claims the best steaks in the world (from the Chianina cow breed, named after the Chiana river and valley), has a fascinating history dating back 3,000 years ago through the Etruscans, Romans, Medici, great cheese, and many pasta specialties.

Cortona at sunset:

We had a wonderful time with some MindShifting moments thrown in to keep us on our toes.

It was a 2 km walk to the center of town, and was described as moderate and rolling, so I decided to take the two aunts on a walk and then meet up at a walking tour. What I didn’t know was that because of the winding roads and steep pitch, it was quite strenuous for 86-88 year-olds. Here are the aunts taking a break after making it down a 20 degree pitched cobblestone street.

Not that I completely learned my lesson, as we took an even longer route down on a pouring rainy day with Aunt Lennie. On that day we first walked up to the Santa Margherita Basilica where her 900-year-old mummy lies in state, and then down to town. In the pouring rain.

Santa Margherita’s mummy in the basilica:

Google and Apple Maps would sometimes misfire, not realizing that some roads were impassable by car. At one time we needed to have one passenger walk in front of the car to make sure the car could navigate the narrow sharp curves on a road that had a precipitous drop on one side and a stone wall on the other. Two more times we repetitively looped for miles (or kilometers) when we were told to turn right on a nonexistent road. Usually, by the third time around, we would realize we needed to reframe the situation. The second time, we regrouped and decided to just eat dinner at home rather than at a restaurant, and we had fresh made bread, Italian sausages and salamis, local Pecorino sheep cheese, Italian olives, local fresh figs and grapes, and local red and white wines. Not a bad second choice, right?

Our hike (15km in rolling countryside) was beautiful and strenuous (the aunts opted out) through the scenes from the movie gladiator which were filmed in the Val d’Orcia just outside of Pienza. What you don’t see in the picture is that as a result of heavy rains the previous day, some of the walk was through the infamous Tuscan mud, which caked onto our shoes and made the steeps a little slippery. We all laughed at the 1-2 centimeters of mud stuck onto the soles of our shoes and which weighed close to a kilogram (2 pounds) per shoe.

Here was one of the views on the walk:

Our most romantic meal was at the Podere II Casale restaurant outside of Pienza. This is an organic farm, and everything they served was grown and made on premises; bread, cheese, wines, herbs, vegetables, meat, desserts. It was outdoor dining.

Here was the view:

The couple on the left lived in Australia and eloped that day. They didn’t have any wedding pictures, but we gave them this one:

And here we are at our last dinner on my wife’s birthday:

And now, back to work.