Family, Family and more Family II; Chianti or bust

(Traveling days: Tuesday, May 21-Thursday, May 23rd)

So, picking up where we left off from the previous blog, we got to the main station in Rome with no major issues and jumped on the train toward Florence. We had bought train tickets off the Eurostar website for traveling in Italy. The deal was for any three days within a 2-month time span, we could ride the trains anywhere in Italy, plus we had upgraded to 1st class too!

We took our seats and got all comfortable. We started riding; life was good. The train conductor came around and asked for our tickets. I whipped them out, and he said that we needed our supplement. A supplement for what?? Apparently we had to pay extra to be on the Eurostar and fast trains...who knew!?

Long story short, the tickets allowed us to travel in Italy on the intercity/country trains but not on the direct and/or main trains from city to city. If we rode on these trains we had to pay an extra supplement. The catch was, to ride on the "good" trains, the travel time was almost ½ as short! Of course we (and everyone else) wanted to upgrade. The supplement wasn’t too expensive but if anything, it just caught us off guard and were annoyed...especially since we had gotten a similar deal from the same website for Josh when he came to visit back in December. His was for travel in Switzerland, not Italy, and it was flawless.  He could basically ride any public transportation anywhere in Switzerland for free.  Apparently, in Italy, they do things differently.

Anyway, we got to Florence from Rome in 1.5 hrs. It was raining when we left Rome and was still raining (hard) in Florence, so we opted to take a cab and arrived at our hotel 10 minutes later. The hotel was the top floor of some random building (so random, in fact, that I thought the guy had dropped us off on the wrong street), right in the middle of the city. The location was awesome and the hotel was average. We dropped our things off and headed out, umbrellas in tow!

My umbrella was jacked!!

We walked around and saw the main site of the city, the Duomo, Bell Tower, Ponte Vecchio, the major museums, etc. To our advantage, it was raining just a bit on and off so the market area was completely booming with vendors but not shoppers. We were able to move from one stand to the next and chat with the locals, bargain with them, etc. It was fun! We got quite a few things there too.

Haggling over a hat

That evening none of us were really hungry so we just had a “snack” night. Aggie and I walked up the street to a local café and got a calzone and some wine to go. We split that amongst ourselves and enjoyed a few other tasty treats; we did some fine dining that evening in Ferd and Audrey’s room!

Wednesday we had breakfast at the hotel and then went out to explore the Tuscany region. We had organized for a private driver to take us all around the area. The first stop was to "The Mall" where all the major Italian designers have outlet stores. Then, we went to a wine tasting and finally stopped in several small villages/towns throughout the Chianti region and worked our way back to Florence.

The Mall area was cool, that is if you had the money for it. They had everything from Gucci to TODS to Emmanuel Ungaro to Ermenegildo Zegna. In the stores you could just envision the runway models with the clothing on, strutting their stuff! For an outlet though, it was still very pricy. The best comment was from Ferd, “I want to go back to the streets!” (He was referring to the street markets.)

We piled back into our van and went on to an outstanding wine tasting near the village of San Gimignano. It was so much fun and we got a meal out of the deal too. We sampled 2-3 wines with an appetizer that consisted of salami, cheese, and bread (which was drenched in fresh olive oil). Then we sampled 3 more wines with our main course, lasagna. Not just any lasagna...our host Luigi's mother's lasagna. This was one of the best lasagna dishes I have ever sampled in my life…seriously. Finally, we had a refreshing, sweet dessert wine to top off the whole meal and then out came the Grappa! Talk about clearing out the nostrils...

Us...about four-deep in wine

From there we went to San Gimignano and walked around a bit. Then we went to Castellinao in Chianti and finally Greves. The whole day was supposed to be for eight hours, but our driver, Alessandro, took us around for an additional 1.5 hours more! It was tons of fun and we really enjoyed ourselves.

We got back from such a wonderful day and made the mistake of going out to eat that night. There was a huge soccer match on that evening (the Champions League final), and I really wanted to see it. The pub we went to was packed so we just opted to grab something at a pizzeria near our hotel. The service was HORRIBLE and the food was average. Mom had some sort of slimy things in her salad and Ferd had sardines in his. Plus, to top it off, I had to leave the table because I felt sick (too much wine and beer in one day for me I guess!). My parents and Ag said my meal however, which they ate because their's were horrible, was very delicious….

The next day we checked out and headed to the Florence train station. Our next stop was Venice. We got our supplement tickets (ah hah! I said to the ticket checker man this time around), and since we had some time to kill, I got our supplement tickets for Como secured too. The train was packed, and everyone seemed to be trying to go to Venice that day. We squeezed our way through the asiles only to fine some other Americans in our seats.

We ended up just swapping them seats to make the situation easier for everyone. I talked to the dude a bit, and they had the same train tickets we had ordered off of the Eurostar site. They couldn’t believe how crazy it was that we had to get the supplements too. The tickets were basically useless (and yet curiously expensive)! Oh, well. Live and learn...at least we all had our noses in tact (sort of)...onward to Venice!