La Rocca

The highest inhabited point you can see from Pienza is the town of Radicofani (pronounced Radi-co-fahn-ee).  It's about 20 km from Pienza as the crow flies but 35 km by car.

The hill seems impossibly high.  We find it hard to believe that when we were younger, we rode our bikes to the town...twice.

This time, we got a ride with Seattle friends Rebecca Fox and Bob Heller, who stopped by to visit for a few days.

Trying to decide whether to start an antique car collection

The town has a distinctive look.  All the buildings are stone with horizontal stripes of brick.

What makes the town unique, however, is the fortress that towers over everything...atop an impossibly steep hill.

In 1253, the rebels from the losing side in one of several Sienese civil wars, fled Siena and perched upon the highest hill they could find to defend themselves.  Over the next few years, they built a fortress as further defense.

The signs in town told us it was a 15 minute walk up to the fortress (La Rocca).

It was a 15 minute walk

...for a mountain goat

The fortress is almost 800 years old and still standing.

Inside, the pictures tell the story...

The cistern to store water in case of seige

Carving over dungeon entrance

And...as always...the view from the fortress to the valley below wasn't too bad...

La Foce

La Foce is a place Carol always wanted to visit.  Until today, we never had made it there.

La Foce is the southern-most point on the map

Today’s ride was 54 km with 1,109 m of climbing (more than a kilometer!).  For the cyclists among you, that included two Cat 3 and one Cat 4 climb.

The story of La Foce is the story of Iris Origo.

Iris Origo was born to a wealthy Long Island family in 1900.  She was raised in a former Medici villa outside Firenze.  She married the son of a prominent Roman banker, and together they bought a barren estate just outside Montepulciano...La Foce.

The entrance to the estate

  

  They completely rebuilt their house.  They rebuilt the houses of their impoverished tenant farmers, built a health clinic and a school where there had been none.  The land had been over-farmed for centuries.  The soil was so poor, the tenant farmers could barely scratch out a subsistence living.  Using modern soil conservation techniques, they restored the land to productivity.

During WW II, they secretly aided the partisans, and hid downed Allied airmen.  In the two decades after the war, many of the tenant farmers joined the leftist political parties or moved to the cities to find work.  The wheels came off the tenant farming system all over Italy.  La Foce was no exception.

However, La Foce kept its world-famous formal gardens.

Carol at the gardens

Iris Origo’s grand-daughter now runs the estate as an upscale Bed and Breakfast.

    

Telling the La Foe story to a pair of Canadian cyclists.

And the view from the B&B isn’t too shabby.

The Town with No Name

Yesterday morning we tempted fate, hoping to get a bike ride in before the next weather system pelted us with yet another thunderstorm.  We succeeded.

We were trying to ride to La Foce...a small village revitalized during the 1920's by an American woman and her Italian husband.  More of that story when we actually get there.

We never made it to La Foce...dead-ended by roads where the pavement ends.  Instead, we wandered around and found perhaps the most beautiful ride we've yet encountered in Tuscany...which is saying quite a lot.

The ride first went to Montecchiello, a tiny village with one of the two best restaurants in the area.

After leaving Montecchiello, we got our bearings right and decided to extend the ride (it turned out to be 50 km long with 820 m of climbing) with a visit to what Pienzans call "the town with no name."

Pienza lies at the north-east entrance to the Val d'orcia.  San Quirico at the north west.  Either can control access to the whole valley.  They have been arguing and fighting over it for centuries.  The rivalry is so fierce many native Pienzans refuse to utter the name "San Quirico."

Consequently, we wanted to see what made the town so horrible.  Take a look:

The main street

The Duomo

The commercial district

The community rose garden

...and...

The view on the ride home.

Pienza...at last!

We finally made it to Pienza...our home for the next 9 weeks.

Why did we choose this small town out in the middle of nowhere?

The Duomo dominates the town

The town hall across the piazza from the Duomo

The wall that keeps the city from
sliding into the Val d'Orcia

A residential "street"

Our apartment is really small and organized differently than a similar-sized apartment in the US.  This will take some getting used to.  But the view out our windows can’t be matched....

The Val d' Orcia from our apartment

Looking the other direction

Pienza is not the easiest place to get to...especially on a bicycle.  Remember all the times we commented on how flat the landscape in the PO Valley is?  Here’s an idea of how different the terrain is in toscana.  

In the Po Valley, we rode our bikes 300 km and had roughly 300 meters of climbing.  As soon as we got settled, we shed our 40 pounds of panniers (saddlebags) and headed out for a short ride to  a few of our favorite nearby towns.

In the first 10 km of the ride, we hit hills of 10%, 12%, and 15% grades (For those of you who are not cyclists, the US Department of Transportation will not permit a federal highway with more than a 6% grade).  In a mere 30 km, we had 680 meters of climbing.  Comparing that to the Po...this ride was 22 times as hilly.  And we haven’t taken on any really big hills yet.

As we settle in, we’ll send you some hints of what daily life in the Tuscan countryside is like.  Today, starting before 7am, we were hit with an amazing thunder and lightning storm.  As we rolled over and decided it would be a good day to get organized in the apt and to read and to finally get caught up with blogging, we thought of the FOUR bike tour groups staying several blocks away at the Cloisters.  They are REI, VBT (Vermont Bike Tours, the group we came here with our first time to Italy), Backroads and Ciclismo Classico.  Not a day to be on the bikes.  It is now mid-day and the squalls continue.  So far, there have been three days like this, more than we have experienced in our five prior trips all together.  Tomorrow’s forecast is not much different.  

Carol is starting to knit a pair of wool socks.  Roger is starting a new book on Boundelmonte whose murder typified the century long civil war between the Guelfs and the Ghibbilines in Florence of the 13th century.  The book, A Thing Done, is not great literature, but it is a fun telling of the story and describes the culture and politics of the time.  Can you guess that Carol really likes that time period and Roger is not far behind?  

Pienza's main street...after the tourists left.

Carol with her favorite flower of Pienza...
but we can't figure out its name

By the way, we have had one set each of on and off the bike clothes for the past three weeks.  It is really sweet to be back with our suitcases and clean clothes.  Standing outside our apt, in front of you is the panorama of the Val d' Orcia and behind you is the laundry line with our things drying.  We are not yet caught up with our blog posts, but we are caught up with washing dirty laundry.

To be continued........

Rain, Rain Go Away...We are in Certaldo to Stay (but one night)

As much as we liked the cities of the Po Valley, we were really looking forward to heading south to Tuscany for our 9 week stay in Pienza.  Bologna was too far north, and on the wrong side of the Appinine, for us to ride to Pienza, so we took a train to Certaldo to put us within striking range of our home for the next two months.

Why Certaldo?  Because Boccacio---Dante’s biographer and author of Decameron---was born and buried there.

The church where Boccaccio is buried

Boccaccio's tomb

Almost as soon as we set foot in town, we looked at one another and said, “This is what we came to Italy for.”

The old city of Certaldo

The Roman Gate

Certaldo is half way between Firenze and Siena...just west of the famous Chianti wine country.  On a clear day, you can see Siena off in the distance.  

Two days of constant rain had ended.  The rain clouds and fog were lifting over the hills, the famous colline di toscana (little hills of Tuscany.)  Che bella!

The old city of Certsldo is up the hill from the train station and a throwback to an earlier time.  Without bikes, it is a three minute tram ride up the side of the hill.  With bikes, in the pouring rain, it took a bit longer.  Fortunately, we fortified ourselves at a covered bar before the walk up the hill.

 

The ducal palace, at the highest point on the hill, sports the coats of arms of all the families that ruled Certaldo since the 1400’s...except for one.  When the Medici’s, who ruled Certaldo for more than a century, were tossed out, the locals took down their coat of arms right away.

Now, it’s on to Pienza!

Safe

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-...

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bE6JDw...

Feel free to open this page.

Click here to check the URL yourself.

Trend Micro Page Rating