April 22. Day 2 in Montalcino

We got a good night's sleep on the farm and woke up to the sounds of birds chirping like crazy and people bantering back and forth in Italian down below. The family who owns La Crociana live there and so do all the people who work on the vineyard. Fiorella, the mama, Barbara, the daughter, Roberto, the son, and the Dad, who I call Senor because we never caught his name, were really nice to us and very excited to have a young couple staying. It seemed like wherever we went we met other Americans who were there with their Rick Steves book...but they were all about 25 to 30 years older than we are. Probably most people our age were partying it up in FLorence, Rome, and Siena, but we enjoyed our slow paced vacation.

Here is a look out of one of our windows (and a not very good picture of me when I just got up):


And here is where they did wine tastings.


At night, bats flew by our windows and Jim reassured me by telling me that when he lived in Italy they used to regularly find bat poop on the floor. He also told me to watch out for scorpions in my shoes. He really set the mood.

Here are Barbara and Roberto--brother and sister and our hosts:



Montalcino is famous for it's Brunello wine. It is a small, charming town, with a large, mostly non-functioning fortezza and the requisite Duomo (very small), museums, coffee shops and beautiful views. On our first day there, we wandered around and spent a good amount of time eating (that was the theme of our vacation). As it always goes, Jim got sick, but he still dragged himself around with me. Here he is posing in the fortezza.

And enjoying his first cappucino of the day (he doesn't really look normal in the mornings until he has his coffee).

The coffee in Italy was the best we have ever had (sorry, Mom!). We drank caffe lattes and cappucinos constantly and still took a siesta almost every afternoon! At about 1:00 each day, everything shut down for several hours, while the Italians went home to have big lunches and rests with their families. We timed our comings and goings kind of badly at first, rolling into town about an hour before things shut down usually. But we got better.

Where there is a lot of wine, there is also a lot of cheese. Here I am saying cheese in one of the cantinas.

And here was our first Montalcino meal. YUM!

In the afternoon, they started setting up for a festival (eventually we found out that it was the Italian celebration of independence from the Nazis)and we listened to a quartet of Italians sing some familiar songs. They really liked Simon and Garfunkle.