We find a great spot to have lunch, where we can just spot the medeival towers of San Gimignano. Today appears to be the unofficial Italian motorbike championship, as we can see and hear countless 1,000 cc road bikes roaring past us! Obviously a popular stretch of road for them. The drive towards Volterra is spectacular, it's very high, misty and seems like you're on top of the world!
There is this huge fortress at the top, but unfortunately it's the state prison! So I guess we won't be going inside then... We wind our way to the main square, which is very pretty and the old town hall is somewhat reminiscent of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
There seem to be lots of shops selling alabaster. Apparently Volterra is a centre for the production of this most ancient of stones. In fact when we were in Florence on holiday I bought a rather nice alabaster chess set, and today we discover that here you can find almost every article ever known to man, crafted from alabaster!
We spot a sign for a Roman theatre and go and investigate... indeed we find this very nicely preserved 1st century B.C. Roman theatre which was only discovered in the 1950's. There are no doubt many other fascinating Etruscan artifacts and frescoes to see, but time is pressing on and we have to get back home. However yet another intriguing town to come back and delve into a little deeper another time.Click here for the New Moon trailer. The countryside of Volterra is shown at 1:29 (although the town shots are of Montepulciano) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I75iHY43HLY
Livorno and 'I Mai Visti'
The Tuscan coast is about an hour's drive away from Florence and we do pay the port town of Livorno a visit, where I enjoy my first ice cream of the year.
I'm also in Florence again to check out another art exhibition. In the storehouses of the Uffizi lies tens of thousands of paintings and every so often the gallery puts on a special, free exhibition. It's called 'I mai visti' (never before seen), so I pop along to have a butchers. Most of the paintings and artists are fairly obscure, but there are a couple of paintings by Titian and Boticelli as well as some Flemish paintings and Greek marbles. Not a bad way to spend a friday afternoon!
(Original journal entry 24/2/02)
3 comments:
Your father would have enjoyed the bikes. Lets hope your never a guest of the prison and Italian ice cream is the best
the windy, hilly roads in Tuscany are perfect for big motorbikes. Yeah a shame he never motorbiked here... maybe too late now? The ice cream here is incredible! We have about 4 favourite places where we always have to get one, you can have 3 different flavours! You can see it's very hard to lose weight! :o)
I loved your blog, congratulations on a successful
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