Our most recent WWOOF site is located in a small village called Ponteginori. Our village is surrounded by a few other small villages and cities including Cecina, saline, and Volterra that are all no more than a 20 minute drive from one another. We were given three days off from our weeding in the hot sun, and with them we spent a day on the beach in Cecina and one in the walled medieval city of Volterra, but I'm going to talk about our day in Volterra! First and most importantly, for those of you who don't know, a chunk of one of the Twilight movies was filmed in Volterra. I actually don't know that much about it but I guess the town got some well deserved screen time in the most recent movie, since it serves as the vampire HQ of the world or something in the books. You should probably just google the city to see for yourself and appreciate how cool it is, but I will also explain it as well! First off we can see the city from our wwoof site at night. It sits on the very top of the highest tuscan hill that we can visably see, and once the sun sets the city lights illuminate
a corner of the otherwise completley barren landscape. The city sits on the very top of a hill encompassed by a fully intact city wall. In fact to enter the practically pedestrian only city you still have to locate one of the city gates to even get inside. There are no sidewalks within the city because cars are not allowed into the city walls without a special permit. The only cars we encountered were ambulances and vans delivering goods to some local shops, squeezing tactfully through the slender streets that were quite crowded during the daytime.
However the Italian sun is not very forgiving when it comes to heat, and these narrow paths ment buildings close on either side and they did a great job of providing lots of shade and keeping Sarah and I sun burn free, not to mention made the weather perfect.
But about how we arrived to Volterra...busses in the italian countryside are slow, infrequent and require payment sooo We hitched! Don't worry mothers it's actually quite safe in these parts. Both our current and previous wwoof hosts suggested it because past wwoofers have done it as well and had great success, and we countinued that trend I suppose. Likely because we look like a nice young traveling couple, we got picked up in less than 2 minutes. I think to be exact it was the 4th or 5th car that picked us up. It was a young man, driving a nice car who also had a child. He was really nice and it was a comfortable situation despite the rough language barrier. Because he was a resident of volterra he dropped us right off at a city gate and we started our day. We initally walked around a few shops to see what they had to offer. This area of Tuscany is known for having lots of alabaster, which is a very soft stone, which makes it incredible for carving into, and Volterra is known for its alabaser workshops. We saw more random alabaster trinkets than we perhaps wished to.Reusable wine corks with an alabaster top for gripping, lamps through which light penetrated, some really cool chess boards and pieces, painted fruit, delicately carved statues, creepy owl heads, eggs, rings, jewlery, anything you can think of pretty much. Fun to look at but not very practical for us to carry along with for the rest of our trip. Next on our mind was food. Food was actually on our mind most of the day in Volterra. There were pizza shops and gelato shops everywhere. I'm going to be honest it was not a very healthy day. I think Sarah and I together probably bought gelato close to ten times, and I don't regret any of it. We tried chocolate, pineapple, orange, peach, hazelnut from 3 different shops, stratchiatella, strawberry, fudge, banana, and probably some others we cannot remember. And then we ate pizza, a few different times. It was pretty much the best day ever. Between binge ice cream eating we did see some pretty cool things too. I really liked the roman ampetheatre located just outside of the city. Sarah and I skipped the entrance fee and saw the whole thing from an arial view ontop of the city wall. What was really interesting is the ampatheatre had only been discovered 50 years ago. Before, it was burried in trash and debris and no one was the wiser. Parts of it were still being excavated when we were there. It was still in pretty good condition although the romans decontructed half of it to make a suana/ roman baths area behind it, once they apparently no longer used the theatre. There was a nice park within the city walls that Sarah and I walked around for a while and relaxed and rested our feet from cobblestone walking. We had some wine at a nice outdoor cafe located at a very high point of the city. Looking over the city wall revealed miles of tuscan farm land and hills, including the one our very own farm perches on!
The city does not stay open late, it usually closes down around 11-1130 so our orignal plan was to go see the last Harry potter film, as they just so happened to have a cinema in town and were showing it on opening night! We assumed that it would include Italian subtitles as well as in English with the actors orginal voices. We assumed wrong. No worries though the information desk was able to inform us this before we bought tickets. So instead of seeing Harry Potter we drank some more wine. Regional Tuscan rose wine to be exact. I'm not much of a wine drinker but the wine is really good and cheap here I am devleoping a taste for it, and Sarah loves it. Also Sarah's uncle Rick and now our WWOOF hosts have both generously served us very nice wine with every dinner so have tried lots of different kinds as well. After we had some drinks we grabbed some amazing dinner outside in a medieval alleyway lined with tables. It was one of the best meals I've had on this trip so far, SO good! We ate dinner pretty late so once we paid out our bill we decided to head back to our accomodations which were located just out of the city wall, making it much cheaper than the ones within. Only 20 euro each actually (we usually pay twice that, each). This price was also because our room was a recently converted cell in a monestary. Though don't get any ideas about cold stone, this place was spacious and lovely. The place was really old, and not perfectly clean, but it had SO much character and charm. Since it was a monestary, the hallways around every corner were extremley long and resonant. The celings were highly vaulted and there weaslots of artwork on the walls and heavy oak furniture. All of the rooms used to be the monks quarters, and you could even go out into where the inner cloister was and see the refectory and chapel and gardens. We had a really good view, being on top of a hill and looking down into the parts of Volterra that fell outside of the city wall. With the windows open at night at that height it was really cool, unlike our usual sleeping arrangements here.
In the morning we grabbed some gelato and french baggettes for breakfast and took the bus down the forever steep and windy road. Sarah got sort of car sick from the windyness of the road but was able to recover once we made it to the bottom. In a moment of irresponsibility we lost our wwoof hosts phone number and were thus unable to call her to pick us up from Ponteginori (ten minute drive from the farm). Lucky the day before I had made a mental note of how to get back to our farm just in case we had to walk sometime. Walking from town to the farm takes probably a little over an hour, but 3 minutes into our walk Penelope, our host came across us on the road and picked us up. Such luck, we were saved from sunburn again! All in all volterra was amazing, a nice little relief from hectic large-city tours. Tomorrow we are off on a crazy week of touring in which we will visit Florence, Rome and Naples before settling down on the Amalfi coast for a few days. until next time!
Ciao Ciao!
No comments:
Post a Comment