Tuscan Hill towns take 2

We are in Venice now. I got up early this morning (so unlike me) and am letting Chris sleep in while I blog. We left the Tuscany area 2 days ago but I wanted to share some fun stories about our adventures there. So, we got into Orvieto (our hill top town we stayed in for 3 days there) on this past Sunday morning. We spent the day in Orvieto, checking out the town-really pretty with a gorgeous huge church. The next day our adventure began. We picked up our rental car-a stick shift car. I had practiced driving stick about 5 times over a period of a few months (thanks to my coworker Brent for being my drivers ed teacher and letting me drive around the work premises several times in the company truck!) and thought I would be prepared. . . wrong! So, one thing I wasn't quite able to practice was driving through the sharp hills of Tuscany with tons of traffic. I was awful. My car stalled several times on the hills was tons of people right behind me, honking at me. I was horrified and about to cry and cursing ALOT! I got better as the day went by and we were able to take a day trip to Civita. Civita is about 30 min drive from Orvieto. Beautiful, tiny hilltop town, that you have to reach by an elevated bridge, this place is so serene and sweet with sweeping views of the hills around. Chris & I really loved it. For lunch in the town, I had some brushetta (it was yum) and Chris had a mixed plate of meat, pretty much each of our staples during the trip.

After Civita, I managed to drive us to the town of Bolsena on Lake Bolsena . . . without stalling the car once. The lake views were really nice and peaceful. We headed back to Orvieto afterwards. We hit some traffic on the way home & I freaked out again. I told Chris we were heading to the car rental place to return the car. I had enough. Luckily, we were able to talk the girl at the rental place to give us a car with automatic, which sounds silly to Americans, but is actually really rare in Tuscan Italy. We got a minivan!!!!!! I told Chris I was done with driving for this trip and that he would have to drive!!! So, he drove the minivan!!! It was so funny. I told him I felt like we needed like 3 kids in the back of it to get the full effect of the minivan!!! Just kidding, we're not ready for that yet!!



Anyway, the next day-Tuesday-was one of my favorite days of the trip. We drove from Orvieto to Montepulciano 1st, about a 45min drive. This is a Tuscan hilltop city famous for its Vino de Noble red wine. This is also where the Tuscan scenes were filmed for the Twilight series movie Eclipse. Chris thought that was pretty cool. We hung out in the town center and then went to sample some of the wine. It was pretty good. After Montepulciano, we drove to Montalcino, which is famous for its Brunello red wine. The drive took about 30 min and is one of the most beautiful drives in Tuscany, absolutely gorgeous views and in all directions.



We loved Montalcino because of the wine and the peacefulness there. Whereas Montepulciano was touristy and kind of crowded, Montalcino was quiet. We went to a recommended wine store there and sampled 6 wines, 3 affordable Brunello wines and 3 totally not affordable red wines. All of the wines tasted really good, but it was really cool how the expensive wines (from $100 to over $200 US dollars a bottle) were so smooth and buttery. We had sooo much fun doing this.


We are in Venice now. We got into Venice yesterday around noon. We did so much yesterday, yet we didn't even feel rushed. We did a tour of the grand canal and St. Marks Square, we went into the top of St. Marks Square Belltower (while the bell was ringing-so loud) for beautiful views of the city, toured Frari Church-a beautiful Franciscan church with a nice painting by Titian at the alter and where is he is buried. This was important to me since Titian was one of my favorite artists. Last night we were going to top our night off by relaxing in St. Marks Square but we got there and the square was flooded with water from the high tide. We heard that this could happen but is was kind of cool to experience this. People were taking their shoes off and walking around in the water. The water was up to their shins. It was cool.

Today, we are going to tour St. Marks Basilica and the Doges Palace. The Doge was the ruler of Venice back when Venice was the leading city in Europe, around 1300-1500 I think.