Italy Trip – Day 10, Assisi

This year was my wife Eileen and my 25th Wedding Anniversary, so we decided to go to Italy for 17 days in June - spending our actual anniversary in Florence.  I decided not to take my laptop with me, so I wasn't able to blog while we were traveling, so I am now taking the opportunity to tell the story of our "Italy 2008" trip.

Its a beautiful sunny morning.  We get up and shower - the water is freezing - hope this is not a bad sign.  At breakfast, Noella explained that the lightning yesterday must have blown a fuse - at least I think that's what she said. Anyway, she assures us it will be fixed tomorrow. 

We decide to head off to Assisi, via Pienza, Bottelle and Perugia - its about a 2 hour drive and is the furthest we plan on driving from our base in central Tuscany.

Assisi

We follow Rick Steves walking tour of Assisi - we stopped for Pizza and a drink in the piazza in front of the Basilica Santa Chiara (Saint Clare) - bottom left picture.  The basilica was closed over lunch.  The main Basilica of St Francis (bottom right picture) was at the other end of the town so we walked quite a bit - it was worth it though - Assisi is a beautiful town with wonderful vistas over the valley. 

We left Assisi at about 3:30 - we thought about heading for Cortona (site of Frances Mayes book - Under the Tuscan Sun) as it was only about a 20km detour, but just as we drove through Perugia it started raining heavily, so we headed back towards Pienza and Montepulciano - two Tuscan Hill Towns much closer to our B&B. 

We stopped first at Montepulciano - it was the first town we came too.  It was still raining a little but we found somewhere to park and wandered into the town.  We visited the the town square and the Duomo before everything shut for the day at about 6pm. 

Unfortunately, none of the restaurants opened before 7pm so we had an hour to kill and nothing to do.  We decided that we would use the time to drive to Pienza, about 20 km away and have dinner there, but as we were walking back to the car we heard a lot of noise coming from a small Piazza just off the main road through town. 

They were broadcasting the Italy vs Romania Euro 2008 game in the piazza - projecting the image onto one of the walls  I watched the game for about 30 minutes, while Eileen wandered the shops, but at half-time we decided to drive on to Pienza anyway, where we parked and had dinner at the "Latte di Luna" restaurant - an excellent meal and only 45 Euro - one of the best values of the trip. 

We even had desert - tiramisu - but only because it had started to rain again, and we didn’t want to leave quite yet.