Culture In Pienza-May 2016

Friends often ask us, what do you do for culture in a town of 2,000 people in rural Tuscany?

One could easily make the argument, with scenery like this, who needs culture?








But actually, there's quite a bit available.  Pienza has a Spring Chamber Music Festival...which ended just before we got there this April.  The town of Torrita di Siena, a half hour's drive away, hosts a European Blues Festival each summer.  And a little bar in the town of Montisi manages to attract rock bands for jam sessions several weekends a month.  None of these events was accessible to us, but it turns out what was accessible was pretty good.

The nearby town of Montepulciano has tucked away just off the main piazza Plazzo Ricci, which houses a music school for a German University...Hochschule für Musik Detmold.

Each week, students from the school perform..

This is not La Scala or the Met.  There is no set, no microphones, no orchestra, the performance shot with and iPad.  These are students...but all things taken into account...they acquit themselves quite nicely.

A few days later, with the sun setting over the Val di Chiana, we returned to Palazzo Ricci for another concert...this one a brass orchestra composed completely of French horns playing Mozart.

But it was not just Palazzo Ricci that provided music.  At Fonte Bertusi, a small agriturismo a short walk from Pienza, there was Spring Music Week.

The performers here were students as well, just graduated from a music school in Siena.

The group was Trio Swann.  They performed some Franz Schubert in the intimate setting of a living room...

How Far Will Carol Go for a Glass of Good Wine?

As most of our friends know, shortly before we left for this trip to Italy, Carol broke a bone in her foot.  She was confined to a boot (she called "la Barcheta"...the boat) while she recovered.



This severely restricted her mobility and put a serious dent into her plans for cycling while we are here.





Ah, but technology came to the rescue.

Carol's friend Stefi has a shop here in Pienza that rents e-bikes.



You still must pedal to get anywhere...

...but the motor on the back wheel provides a little boost that helps you get up the ubiquitous hills.

It comes with a rechargeable battery....but with motor and battery added the bike weighs 50 pounds...three times what her normal bike weighs.

Carol started slowly, riding her e-bike without "la barcheta" and increasing mileage and stress on her foot a bit each day.

Finally, the day came for the big test.

From Pienza through San Quirico d'Orcia, up the big hill to  Montalcino, and then down the prettiest road in Tuscany to the Ciacci Piccolomini Winery.

It turns out Ciacci Piccolomini is a few hundred meters down the road from San Antimo Monastery...about which we had previously blogged (see "Gregorian Chants" from September 2013), but we never knew.

The history of the winery is closely tied to the monastery.

Where the winery now sits was land once owned by the Abbot of San Antimo.







After the unification of Italy in 1860, the Church was required to sell its non-ecclesiastic holdings at auction.  The land was purchased by Alberto Piccolomini, a direct descendant of the Pope who founded Pienza  (see our October 2015 blog post, "The Family Piccolomini").  More than a century later, his last descendant died without an heir...and her will left the land to her estate manager, Giuseppe Bianchini...

...the father of the man in this picture.  (His wife, who owns and runs the winery with him, is on the right.)


His name is Paolo Bianchini.  In his youth, Paolo was Italian Amateur Cycling Champion and later a professional racer.

This, of course, is the reason we road to the winery...to taste his wine and see the cycling museum he's put on his property.

Wine and bicycles together!  Our two favorite vices in one place!  How could we not have found this place sooner?

The museum is filled with momentos from Bianchini's days as a professional racer, his bikes and his racing jerseys.

But also memorabilia from his friends, like this 1997 World Champion's jersey signed by Alessandra Cappolotto...

...or five-time Tour De France winner Miguel Induran...

The setting for the winery is magnificent...

...overlooking their vineyards and olive grove.

The wine itself is pretty respectable too.  Ghino Poggialini, our local wine expert who advises the Vatican on wines to procure, says Ciacci Piccolomini is "not the biggest but one of the most important brunello wineries" there is.

In 2012, Wine Spectator magazine named their brunello one of the ten best wines in the world.

The wine we tasted gave us no reason to doubt either judgement.

(For more on brunello, see our October 2013 blog post "Really Good Wine.)

Their olive oil wasn't too shabby either (Bottle at the right in this picture).  It has a very spicy taste and a peppery after-taste that lingers.
We've never been able to find anything like it at home.

So, along with wine, we're bringing some oil home too.

However good their wine is, the Bianchini's are even better marketers.


They make it a pleasure to drop several hundred euros for lunch, a little wine, and some olive oil.


We joined the winery's bike club our way home.  Note Carol paid good money for the privilege of getting a jersey promoting their brand.  (Roger too!)

The ride home was a beast.

The photo at the right shows Carol mid-way up a 12 km long climb from Monte Amiata to Castiglione d'Orcia.

For the bike geeks among you: 70 km with 1450 meters of climbing (including two Category 2 climbs, the same number the professional racers faced on the next day's stage of the Giro d'Italia).

Quite a comeback for an old lady with a broken foot.  Si?

Festa di Fiori

Last week it was l'Eroica.


This week it was Festa di Fiori...Festival of Flowers...in Pienza.


It seems as if nearly every house, every business, dressed up its front steps, just for the occasion.

Even the old cistern in the main piazza, which supplied water to the town in the 1400's, was re-purposed for the occasion.


While it is not a grand event, it is pretty...


...and it helps build community in ways that we often overlook back home.


Enjoy the pictures!

Not all the flowers were cultivated.

This rosebush has grown 10 feet tall.

Even our friend Sal(vatore) Amander enjoyed all the flowers.

May our garden at home grow so nicely.

Steak Florentine

When Americans think of Italian cuisine, this is what usually comes to mind.


But for many Italians, especially Tuscans, meat  defines their diet...every bit as much as pasta.

The king of meat dishes is steak Florentine...

...huge slabs of beef that make one wonder how can one person, or even six, eat all that?

Steak Florentine comes from special cows...Chianina.  


These cows got their name because they we originally raised in the Val di Chiana, which sits on the other side of our neighboring town of Montepulciano.

At dinner one night, inside the packed restaurant Osteria Acquacheta, we got to see how they make steak Florentine.


Full disclosure:  This restaurant lives off the tourist trade.  The owner, whom we later learned grew up in Pienza, is a character.  At the end of the meal, he comes and tallies your bill on the placemat you ate off. 

This night, about half the people you see in this photo ordered the specialty of the house.

(We got these photos because the restaurant was so packed, they seated five of us at a table for two in the very back.  Three of us ate our dinners sitting on the steps up to the kitchen)

The cooks start with huge chunks of beef.  


During the course of our dinner, we saw them bring three of these mountains of meat from the basement locker up to the kitchen.

As the customer places his order, they cut the meat into two-inch-thick slabs...

...and then bring it to the table for the customer's approval.


Hard as it may seem to believe, one customer actually sent his slab of beef back because it wasn't thick enough.

Carol and Roger often joked that Tuscan restaurants never really cooked their steaks; they just walked them past the oven.

Italians in this part of the world like their beef extremely rare.

But at Osteria Acquacheta, the meat actually went into the wood-fired grill.

...and came out seared and rushed to the table piping-hot.

It Gets Bigger Each Year

For the past several years, the neighboring town of Buonconvento has hosted an classic bike race, known as L'Eroica Primavera.

People from all over Europe...in fact, from all over the world...come to ride antique bikes over 150 km of steep back roads...many of them gravel...of the Tuscan countryside.  Carol and Roger met both Brits and Americans who had come to Buonconvento to participate.

Antique bike rallies have become so popular among collectors and fans that L'Eroica now sponsors events world-wide...from Britain to South Africa and the United States.

At lunch in Buonconvento, we met Giancarlo Brocci, the man who conceived of L'Eroica in 1997 and spread it world-wide, and Wesley Hatakeyama, chairman of the US event, held each April in Paso Robles, California.

The town of Buonconvento decks itself out each Spring for a three-day festival celebrating antique bicycles.  Most shops place old bikes or bike clothing in their display windows.

This year, the barber shop offered haircuts, beard and mustache trims in a style to match the vintage of your bicycle.

The big change both Carol and Roger noticed was the increased number of women participating.

The day before the actual ride, there's a large open-air market, with nearly 30 vendors selling antique parts...

                   ...clothing...

...and expert advice on getting just the right replacement part to keep your bike an authentic classic.

For anybody with the last-minute impulse to join in, a new vendor joined the fray this year, offering to rent a classic bike that meets the strict standards required by the event.

Each year, the route of the ride itself comes through Pienza.


Last year, it came into town up a gravel road with an 18% grade.  Participants groused it was too difficult for even them to manage.



So this year, the organizers altered the route...

...and it came up the long, winding hill...

...passed right under the walls of the Duomo  (Cathedral)...

...and into town where riders got their cards stamped.

Getting your card stamped at several stops along the way is necessary to prove you rode the whole route and didn't take any unauthorized short-cuts.

It had rained heavily the night before the ride, so the gravel roads were muddy and slow.

This man was the first to make it into Pienza, and he was more than an hour later than expected.

Please note, this event is authentic down to the food they serve at the rest stops.  No energy bars here; just bread, wine, and cheese.

The route is so brutally hard that stamina and pacing are more important than speed.  Coming in early to Pienza is no guarantee you'll even finish the event.



The man at the right rode into Pienza more than an hour behind the leader.  He ended up finishing second over-all, or so his sponsor...a local winery-owner...told us.

After leaving Pienza, the event wends its way along back roads almost 50 km back to Buonconvento, where...led by a pace car...the leaders sprint five times around town before crossing the finish line.

Roger, who was no match for even the weakest of the L'Eroica riders, rode a small portion of the course (carefully avoiding the big hills and gravel roads), and got his hand stamped...just for bragging rights.