About 4 years ago a friend from Canberra bought some houses about 45 minutes drive from our villa. We drove down for lunch on Thursday to her tiny village of Iesa. She has restored the stables of the big house and made a beautiful 2 bedroom 2 bathroom house where she now spends 6 months of the year. Her Italian is very good and she loves village life. She has just cleared her 5 acres of land and is working hard to restore the olive grove which was badly overgrown. Then her challenge is to decide what to do with the big house – a massive 3 storey building which has been unoccupied for a long time and has no plumbing or electricity. I think the restoration of the stables was more demanding of her energy and bank balance than she had anticipated. If you have read Peter Mayle or Frances Mayes’ books of restoring old houses in France and Italy you will have a good idea of the tenor of our lunch conversation on Tuesday – it was delightful to hear of all her little successes in turning a derelict building into a beautiful home.
A couple of long walks
Last weekend we joined a local guided walk just a few kms from here. The first people we met were from Buderim in Queensland who are staying in the next village for 6 weeks. The rest of the group of about 40 were all local Italians and we had a great day. The walk was fairly challenging – down a steep mountainside to a river where we stopped for lunch then back up the other side in the afternoon. It was a warm day and after lunch we had the customary 2 hour siesta – the 4 Aussies stood out in the crowd – we were the ones sitting under the trees in the shade while the Italians stripped off and lay in the sun.
Another day we did one of our walks from our book “Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria”. Over the years we have done about 15 of the walks in this book with varying degrees of success. It was written over 10 years ago and we are finding that some things have changed and the directions are not as reliable as they were. But this week’s walk was great. We started with coffee and pastries ( is there any better way to start a long walk) in the medieval hilltop village of Montereggione and walked through olive groves and forest for a couple of hours. At the top of a rise we came across a memorial to 19 men who were resistance fighters killed in 1945. We walked back through lush farmland of aubergines and peppers and hillsides of vines. It was a beautiful walk and in the six hours we only got lost once which is a pretty good result for us.
Tomorrow we are off to San Galgano a Cisterian abbey – In the 14th century the lead off the roof was stolen by an Englishman Sir john Hawkwood and as a result the whole roof is now missing. Our guidebook says is being restored for an Olivetan order of nuns. We’ll let you know how its progressing in our next blog. Then back to Colle for another Sagra in the evening and the Festa del Vino at nearby Poggibonsi on Sunday evening.
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