After leaving Monteriggioni I aim the car towards Castelline in Chianti, an area well known for its wineries.
And, well, I passed a few. After they thinned out I did a U-turn and went back to the first one which looked the most promising. From the road there was a long, straight line of trees either side of the drive up to the farm house at the end. It was a bumpy drive and I pulled in next to a couple of other waiting cars. I got out and strolled towards the entrance.
A short distance from Colle di val d’Elsa is Monteriggioni. As with a few of the other places that I visited on this trip, I had not even heard of it when I woke up in the morning and, therefore, was pleasantly surprised with what I saw when I got there.
Monteriggioni is another one of Tuscany’s many pretty walled cities, this one smaller than most. You arrive on a steep, narrow path and enter underneath a tower. Inside you immediately find a large, mostly empty square. Around the periphery there are a number of parasols shading cafe tables and postcards and souvenirs spilling out of shop fronts.
Like many people, I take the vast majority of my pictures outside. Yet, how do you get across the greatness of outdoors? I wanted the picture to show the scale and grandeur, the exhilaration of being in the middle of nowhere. It was a tall order so instead I picked this image which was taken on the walk from Sermano to Corte in Corsica.
When I first came to Colle di val d’Elsa I arrived on foot, having walked all the way from San Gimignano. This time it was easier, except for parking the car.
Colle di val d’Elsa is less famous than either San Gimignano or Siena but that’s not to say that it is without merit. It’s another attractive, small Tuscan town. This time made slightly less photogenic by the extensive maintenance work being performed on the main square.
One of the great things about this trip was that some days I’d just fall out of bed, flip open a map and decide where to go on a whim. My visit to Poppi was inspired by this process with a little coaxing from a book called “Most Beautiful Villages in Tuscany
Some things change while others stay the same. Siena was pretty much as I remembered it from my previous trip, although wetter this time. It’s still a very attractive city which somehow manages not to let the vast influx of tourists each year drive out its charm.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I drove to Siena directly from San Gimignano, taking a wrong turning, knocking the right side-mirror off the hire car and finally managing to squeeze into a very full car-park next to the football stadium.
I’m starting to learn that the problem with walled cities, as pretty as they are from a distance and on foot, is that parking can be a nightmare.
San Gimignano, in case you had not already guessed, is a walled city. I picked the parking lot the furthest from the route from the main road — quite sneaky I thought — only to find it already full and the path out almost blocked by a badly parked SUV.
