April 23 Day 3--San Quirico D'Orcia, Pienza and Montalpuciano

On our third day in Tuscany, we drove out of Montalcino to explore some other hill towns. First we stopped of at San Quirico D'Orcia, which was not in any of our tour books, but was really a cool place with lots of old ruins. There was probably a less fun way to get into the walls of San Quirico D'Orcia, but we chose to go through this door:

Here are some of the ruins:

And more beautiful scenery as we made our way to our next stop--Pienza:

In Pienza,I was excited to see that there were public toilets. But I was really surprised when I went into the toilet and found this:

At first I thought I had gone into the mens by accident, but Jim patiently explained to me that some Italian public toilets are pretty much just holes in the ground. Interesting.

Pienza had some pretty incredible churches and also some delicious cheese: pecorino de Pienza. We also got to love Ossi Di Morto (Bones of the Dead), which are flat, sugary, biscotti type cookies.

A Fresco in one of the Pienza churches:


And me looking at it:


From inside of the church:


Jim checked out the view:


From Pienza, we headed to Montalpuciano. Our first stop was yet another church, but, unfortunately it was being renovated or refurbished, so the inside was not looking as glorious as we had hoped. The really wonderful thing about all of the old churches here, besides the beautiful architecture, is that they are so cool inside and, in the winter, I'm sure they are warm. So the churches were nice places to go for some serenity (because even the Americans were quiet in the churches) and to cool off a little.

Montalpuciano is at the top of a very steep hill, so we got our exercise on the way up.

Then we promptly ate some more and did a wine tasting. Jim was so excited about the wine tasting that he could hardly wait.

The kegs were huge!!

Ando, the wine maker, was excited for all the Americans to stop by and showed us all his picture in Rick Steves' Italy. And there we were. All the Americans with our Rick Steves books. Ando gave us generous tastes of the wine and then posed for a picture with a reluctant me. In this picture I look thoroughly flustered and red because he kept calling me bella and whispering sweet nothings in Italian into my ear. I don't know what he was saying, but it was intense. Plus there is something about being called beautiful, even if you know it's just a bunch of fluff.


Anyway, all the sweet talking worked, because we bought some wine from him, which we later ended up giving to the security guys at the airport, because we were anxious about putting bottles of red wine in our suitcases. I'm pretty sure that in the states, we and the security people would have been in trouble for gifting and accepting gifts of wine, but in Italy it is OK and the security screeners were very happy.