Finally Italy

Friday, October 02, 2009

First I will start my making my big blog announcement that I'm pregnant. Thirteen weeks now , due April 12. That meant no delicious Italian wine for me. I technically am not suppose to eat smoked deli meat either, but I was in Italy. I ate lots of prosciutto and salami and enjoyed every bite.

Well on to the actual trip. We stayed at Podere Palazzo, a beautiful 5 bedroom villa that is on the edge of the Lazio, Umbria and Tuscany regions. For some reason no one on the trip really took any pictures of the actual house. There are plenty on the website though. There were 9 of us that stayed in the house. Despite the fact that we didn't know 3 of the people before we went it was fantastic and completely free of drama. I came back with some new friends.

I won't bore with the day to day detail since even to me the medeival hilltop towns started to look the same. The picture above is Montepuliciano a lovely town famous for it's wine. I did buy a bottle that the hubby is suppose to keep his grubby mitts off until I can drink it. Nest to it is the town of Pienza which is basically just a long street. Pienza is famous for it's Pecorino cheese. Daren is not a fan of cheese in any way, so when he charged ahead and told us the town smelled really bad we thought he was exaggerating. He wasn't the little street smells of strong cheese. I brought home some of the aged percorino. They serve it with a drizzle of honey which is surprisingly addictive.


We also visited on of the natural parks. I was stunningly beautiful. The 3 hour drive there in the back seat of the small car with 2 other girls was more then I could take. It wasn't just pregnant stomach either, because the other 2 were queasy as well. Our friend Diane wanted to go there because of trails she read about that had beautiful monasteries along the way. When we got there we found out the hike she wanted to do was 5 hours one way and required equipment!


Seeing as non of us were up to the hike we found a road that drove up to the monastery. It wasup a steep windy dirt road and with 5 adult bums in the seats the little car did not want to
cooporate. We gave up on the car half way up when the smell of the clutch was too much to take. Once we got to the monastary we couldn't figure out how to go around or through. There was just a little sign in Italian on the stone next to what looked like should be some sort of buzzer. We ended up ringing the big bell, but no one came. Later we used Babelfish to decode the sign, it said 'it is prayed to abstain itself from the demand to visit l'eremo. So we basically door bell ditched a monastary.


We ended up getting a cooking lesson back at the villa. A chef from a local restaurant came out to give the lesson. She taught us how to make pasta and roll it by hand. We made fried zucchini flowers with a tomaoto bread salad, a roast beef in rock salt with fresh herbs, and a kind of lava cake chocolatey thing.

That's it for now. I'll do another post on Rome later. We have all of our pictures here.