So after spending a week in this beautiful part of Italy some observations:
The wine and food fantastic on all levels.
The people are friendly and proud of their country.
There are few if any screens for the windows(so mosquitoes can make their own feasts)
Two stoke motor bikes after midnight and before 6 am.
Where you cannnot enjoy the wonderful architecture because of random dog droppings that have to be avoided. :eek:
Re: the mosquitoes. In drugstores you can buy an electronic thingy that you put in the contact, and which dissolves a small toxic tablet that keeps the mosquitoes at bay. Probably limits your life expectancy too.
How was the weather? And where have you been exactly?
I spent a year in Tuscany one week. Not my idea; it was a family excursion.
We were in an old villa up the hill from Quarrata, about an hour west of Florence. The daytime temps were in the mid 90s to low 100s all week. (This was in late June.) I was okay with the villa not having A/C, but it didn’t even have fans. No ceiling fans, no fans that you can plug into electric outlets, no nothing. Afternoons there were hell.
We had a bathroom that had The Tub/Shower From Hell. It looked like it was designed for an eight-year-old child to sit in. There was room by the drain to stand in - just barely. You could sorta sit on the step up from that, but it was a tight fit. And as seemed to be the norm in Europe, there was no shower curtain. So to wash, we had to kinda contort ourselves while running the sprayer attachment from the shower head over our bodies.
What turned out to be the only day we had access to a car, the idiots at the service station put regular gas in the diesel tank, or was it the other way around? Good thing we were only about 5 miles from the villa at the time, and we were able to make it another 2 miles before the car gasped to a halt. A 3-mile trek back to the villa wouldn’t have been too bad by itself, but I screwed things up by trying to do the right thing, and waited by the car for the rental-car people to send a tow truck for it. I gave them the town, the intersection, and the street address, but they couldn’t find me. I still have no idea why.
Next day, the rental car was towed to a local place, and they dropped me off at a train station so I could get a train from Agliana to Montecatini to pick up a replacement rental car. This was about 9am. But due to screwups with trains and language (including getting on a train in the right direction that stopped in Pistoia, and then reversed direction to take me back to where I started) it was siesta time by the time I got to Montecatini. Ever tried to get anything done in a small Italian town in the early afternoon? It took me the entire day to get another car. And I hadn’t even brought a book along when I left the villa, assuming I’d be away at most an hour or two.
There’s a lifetime’s worth of places in this world I’d like to go that I haven’t seen, and many I’ve been to that I’d like to see again. Tuscany’s not on the list.