Toscana

We've spent 4 days in Tuscany now, with 4 more to go. I really do love it here. There are tiny hilltop villages as far as the eye can see, and each is charming and worthy of a postcard. The sun has been shining every day, the food is brilliant (think beautifully aged cheeses, piles of truffle, cloudy olive oil, and cannelloni beans that have never tasted so good), the local wines cost less than water and they are excellent. But more than that, I am really enjoying the style to life here. Firstly, these people make the French appear to be hardworking and industrious. The shops open at 9:30am (no need to get up early) and then close at 12:30 for lunch. Lunch lasts until 4pm (yep, 3.5 hours). It is not lost on me that you would actually have time to go home, drink a bottle of wine, take a nap, sober up, and get back to work on time. Then they reopen at 4pm and close again at 7pm. Start to finish, we are talking a 6 hour workday. Of course these are the long and tedious hours of private enterprise. Most public services, including the post office and library, only open from 9:30 to 12:30 four days a week, and never re-open in the afternoon. This has forced more planning on our part (after all, the butchers and grocery shops close for lunch like everyone else), but we are in the habit of buying meats, cheeses, and bread early in the morning and taking it with us until we find a good spot for lunch.

I'm also really enjoying the interactions with the locals here. We've ordered our evening meals in Italian since we got here – I'm sure many of the staff actually do speak some English, but they are very happy to let you give it a go and work with you. We've been to one trattoria in Pienza twice now, and they brought us extra dessert, a trio of local pecorino cheeses (fresh, aged in olive leaves, and aged in olive oil), and crepes on the house with a wink and a “think nothing of it” smile. We visited a local artist's shop today and bought some handmade pottery -- she spoke only broken English that often slipped into Italian, but could not have been happier to spend 20 minutes showing us pictures of her work, the 2 feet of snow that fell in Tuscany recently (biggest snow since 1956, sound familiar Washingtonians?), and chat about life in general. Most conversations end with about 50 grazies and ciaos and lots of smiles. Italy is magnificent, but small town Italy is even more so.