Day One: Touring Tuscany

I have dubbed our trip the Country-Coastal-City tour of Italy, and that's exactly what it was. When we woke up on Saturday morning, the view from our B&B was absolutely breathtaking. So, you see, it really worked out for us to miss our flight and arrive actually much later than originally planned. It was a gorgeous way to "officially" start our vacation.

Here's a video tour of our room and surrounding area at Il Casello, our B&B.

Il Casello was in the Chianti region between the two villages of Greve and Panzano. We decided we would spend the day exploring both. And what a great plan that was...

Saturday morning was market day in the town of Greve. The streets were filled with merchants selling every possible thing you could imagine - fresh fruits and vegetables, household items, jewelry, seafood, clothes, clothes and more clothes, everything. We just wandered through the little winding streets and explored.

We found this great wine-tasting museum and spent a good hour and only 10 euro tasting all sorts of regional wine. We found one we liked that was actually made there in Greve and decided to ship six bottles home to Mississippi. I'm ready to drink it now that we're home!

With a nice little morning wine buzz we headed back to the market for our first taste of real Italian food. Pizza. Honestly, it wasn't very good and after this picture was taken we found a fly (ew) in Derek's piece, but we knew we had plenty more deliciously authentic food to taste in the coming days, so it was all good.

After Greve, we decided to check out Panzano. It was less than five minutes away from our B&B. Once we parked, our first stop was at the gelateria for some famous gelato. SO GOOD!

We wandered around, stopped for a cold beer at this cool little corner bar (they sold Budweiser), then walked up to the Church of Panzano for a great view of the village.

On the way back down the hill we stopped in at the Accademia del Buon Gusto, the cutest little wine shop I've ever seen. "Welcome to what I call my living room," said the very Italian man in a red chef's hat. (Imagine his quotes in a very strong Italian accent.) His name was Stefano Salvadori, and he called himself an instructor of wine tasting.

"To taste is your liberty," he said. "The only way to know is to taste." He had a scrapbook in which people from all over had written little notes of gratitude. He let us taste about 10 different wines - each in what he called the breakfast, lunch, and dinner wine categories. He wouldn't give us prices for any until we decided what we liked. Of course, we were thinking these would be $40-$60 bottles of wine. At the end (and after tasting this amazing dessert liqueur of caramelized grapes) we decided on one of the Chianti Classico "breakfast" wines. He pulled out his cost guide and surprisingly it was only 15 euro (like $20). Sold!

We chatted for a few more minutes with Stefano and got some passersby to take a picture of all three of us. "Is it possible to e-mail for my book?" he asked. And of course, we had to sign the book. "To sign is your liberty," he said. "I do this for my children." The note I wrote to him was about helping us to relax and to simply enjoy loving life, which was so very true. Lovely lesson learned our first day of vacation. Our time spent with Stefano was such a great part of our little Italian adventure. He was such a character.

On to the next stop: another cold beer at the corner bar we found earlier and then siesta time back at the B&B. I think this was when the jet-lag hit us hard and we crashed for a good couple of hours. When we woke up I swear we just would have ordered Pizza Hut if there had been one. We were absolutely exhausted, but we dragged ourselves back out and into Panzano for dinner at the Villa San Giovese in the town square. Dinner itself was just so-so, but the fresh bruschetta we had as an appetizer and the from-scratch cheesecake we had for dessert were absolutely to die for.

So, in conclusion, Day One was a success and we still had seven more wonderful days to come...