[This post is part of the Friendship Tour series and picks up after leaving Rome.]
I've been going to Lucignano for as long as I've been going to Rome...so it's been more than 25 years now since I first fell in love with this medieval town. Hubby worked there and made friends with some of the locals, we visited again maybe in 2000, and once upon a time (it was 2010) we met up with a group of friends and shared an absolutely enchanted week with them in a perfectly Tuscan villa there.
From Rome we drove our rented Skoda towards Tuscany, stopping in beautiful Orvieto for lunch and a walk around to explore this charming Etruscan city. Looking back, I wish we'd had more time or planned this visit (Orvieto could be a full day) or at least looked up some of the things we could have seen out of the heat (like doing an underground tour, or visiting St. Patrick's Well.)
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| Il Duomo di Orvieto |
Around the corner from a piazza we found what turned out to be a great little restaurant down a shaded alley and grabbed an outdoor table. We were the first ones there and I'm glad we arrived when we did, because shortly afterwards, every table both inside & out was taken. The Trattoria dell' Orso did not disappoint! Charlotte loved her prosciutto melone, as always, My truffle pasta was fantastic, and the Orvieto white wine was crisp & cold and it made for a wonderful lunch.
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| Beautiful lunch at Trattoria dell'Orso toasting heading back in Tuscany! |
After another walk to see more of Orvieto, I got a gelato (I can't believe no one else wanted one!), and we headed to Lucignano to visit friends we hadn't seen in 11 years. All of our kids were so little the last time we were there. The dinner that followed was one of those never-ending, outdoor grilling, homemade wine-drinking absolutely lovely reunions with old friends under the stars overlooking the Tuscan hills. Their local sausage, grilled, is the best I've ever had, and I've never tasted anything quite like it anywhere else. I had forgotten how good it is. I briefly considered fighting my husband for the last one that night.
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| Scott & Simona catching up before dinner |
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| Cooking over a wood fire overlooking the hills...delicious! |
Fun fact: Ed Sheeran has a villa nearby, and our friend Massi is the local guy you call to install shower doors, so naturally he's the one who installed them for Ed's place! He told us the villa was nice but not extravagant, and that he felt bad for Ed because he knew that other contractors had taken advantage of him and charged him more than they should have.
That first night Scott and I stayed just up the road at Le Caselle, a beautifully-situated bed & breakfast with a gorgeous pool, where we all cooled off before heading to dinner. (The kids slept at the house, and we did too our 2nd night when there was an extra room available at Simona & Massimo's.) The grounds were gorgeous with olive trees and gardens, shaded tables where you could get drinks from the bar, and a koi pond. The bed & breakfast advertised the room had A/C, but I'm not convinced it ever cooled the room - it was too hot to sleep, and I don't like to keep the windows open with no screens due to mosquitoes and other things. I think hubby got up during the night to take a cold shower to try to cool off. The lovely breakfast and amazing cappuccino the next morning made me forget all about my sleepless night. I would likely stay there again in a cooler month - the pool was really nice and there were those covered beds that feel so luxe!
Simona came out with us for the day to re-visit Cortona, which was as lovely as ever, and we explored a few streets and areas I don't remember visiting before, as well as stopped for my beloved peach iced tea and picked up a few things we needed at the pharmacy. I stopped for a nostalgic moment at a table where I remember having a delicious lunch with the kids when they were little. The Google Street View car drove past us and of course my goofy family struck poses - I wonder when we'll see the new view posted?
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| Does everyone strike a silly pose when the Google Street View car goes by? |
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| This is a closeup of the sculpture you see in the previous photo. Just stunning. |
We ended the day somewhere near Lucignano with dinner at an outdoor restaurant I'm not sure I could find again, but that was packed with locals and served ginormous pizzas that were so light and fresh and delicious that I'm still thinking about them now. I was too enraptured with my food to even get a photo. Simona's sister joined us, which was so fun! It's amazing to think they've all known each other since they were pretty much Julien's age.
It was too bad that we only had that first night of visiting with Massi and the girls, as they had a concert in Milan to get to. We learned later that they got sick with Covid they thought they picked up at the concert and for a few weeks everyone in the household was sick.
Travel Tip: For travel during Covid, be sure to bring along any vaccination documents, thermometers, meds, covid test kits, extra masks for the places that might require them, sanitizer or wipes, and check with your airline and arrival countries to see if they require you use an app like Verifly, or need to provide negative test results or affidavits. Last year we watched Americans absolutely meltdown at the airport in Reykjavik because they didn't check ahead of time and hadn't gone through the process to be allowed back in the US.
You might know that I studied abroad in Italy in college, and for a while my Italian was pretty good. I was one of 2 in our group who interpreted for the other students, made reservations, ordered food, etc. Since it had now been 12 years since we'd been back in Italy, my Italian was pretty rusty, but I was picking it up again pretty quickly. On our last day in Italy though, I felt like my spoken Italian was actually getting worse instead of better, which made no sense! I wonder if it's possible that I was mentally preparing to switch over to French the next day, and that affected it?
Side note: One of the things we noticed driving through Tuscany this July was that the fields of sunflowers were all dried up. Between the extreme heat and the drought (we were told there had been no rain for months) the fields were dead. Olive trees were dead. It was sad to see, and to think of the economic hardship on the farmers. On top of that there were forest fires everywhere, entire hillsides burning or a blackened crust, and fires right along the side of the road, which we would see as we drove through Italy and into the France. Once we crossed over into France, electronic signs along the roads warned people not to toss their cigarette butts out of their cars. I've never been driving and seen so many fires.
It was a fast 2 days in Lucignano, but it was time to say arrivederci to Italia, and drive to our next stop in Provence, France!
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| Next stop, Provence via the Italian Riviera! |
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| It was a full day's drive. |
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