Alicante, at the Inn of the Rabbit

Wow, today was our favorite day in Italy ever. We have been really lucky to have found this area and pretty much by ourselves. from the time we left °Rick Steves favorite hill town° of Citiva di bagnoregio, at 2 pm yesterday, to the time we got back from a long adventurous day at 7 pm, we heard not a word of any word but Italian. then tonight we have maybe heard one word of American (but not sure) and we had some very discrete english couple who barefly muffled an audible word at our next table. We have really enjoyed being inside the community of weekend tourists from Rome, and then today and tonight, lots of locals, just sitting around enjoying the day.

Sitting around enjoying the day... if you are older than 50, you seem to be entitled to do just that. you could be chatting with your buds, or just whiling away the hours. we saw a nice old guy today with no obvious teeth, happily enjoying a gelato cone, in a little piazza with about 4 tables of locals, in a little hill town in the Maremma, Montemorano.

This area seems really lovely to us. There are woods, with second growth oak and chestnut and other hardwoods, often in what probably were fields a generation ago. but there are lots of nice fields, freshly ploughed, showing lots of the colors of the earth, everything from rich brown, to a very light grey, to yellow ochre color, orange and even rich red soils. Like paintbrush colors. This area is all volcanic, apparently millenia ago there were huge pyroclastic flows, leaving lots and lots of erodible tufa, so there are high plateaus, high ridges, deep gorges lined with yellow cliffs and lots of caves, and here and there, rolling farmland. lots of areas for agricultural crops which are all freshly ploughed now, and some sheep land and some grapes and some olives and some apple orchards. Really nice. There are a few hill towns, they are a really nice blend of the old and the new and hardly any have been °cutified° the way the more famous hill towns have been. When there are stores they are hardly aimed at hard core tourists, there are a few knickknack stores selling Etruscan pots and finely painted ceramics and linen clothes, but nothing makes you clutch your wallet and run the other way. There have been lots of tourists in 2s, 3s, 4s and 5s and the occasional great big busload but these are all Italian folks, with a mix of generations, so we have had nice times watching small clusters of older ladies having ice cream on one bench while all their menfolk hang out across the street, almost as if they dont know each other.

Tonight also in Pitigliano we got to sit out on one of the many small squares, having Punt e Mes to drink and sitting among all the local folks, of all ages, sitting, greeting each other, hugging so and sos little boy, and eating peanuts and whatever they want to drink. hardly drinking at all in fact just socializing in front of the local bar-cafe, and the local waitress seems not at all perturbed at everyone just hanging out at her place.


So about the title of todays blog. Alicante is a type of grape and we had an awesome wine, a 100% alicante grape Maremma Toscana IGT, made by a winery called Tenute Poggio al Tufo Tommassi, along with a Morellino de Scansano which is a famous °black° wine. both had really rich flavors, sorry I do not know how to explain wine flavors well, but really serene blend of rich flavors on the tonuge. and the Alicante was just a little bit bubbly when first opened. even though it is a red wine. It almost but not quite fizzed, it was not at all unpleasant.

Today Craig did a LOT of driving. in the morning we woke up and looked out our hotel window both ways along the cliffs of our hill town which were nicely lit in the first morning sun, then we went down the severe s shaped road to the base of the cliffs, looked up at the town and also saw all the many many little storage caves hand-hammered into the rock. some are small bodegas others are quite large enough for cars and some are humongous. some of these caves have been here since the ice age neolithic times. others were made and extended and carved by the Etruscans who were here from 900 bc or thereabouts til the Romans creamed them in bc 350, and they were good pals with the greeks so their funerary caves had greek columns and greek style carvings all over. a few are left. they also made these very unusual deep carved highways, like little roads 8 feet wide and lined by 30 foot cliff faces on both sides, hand pecked from the soft tufa rock, no one knows why, either for spiritual reasons or because they just liked being able to walk out of the sun. I am sure until very recently, everyone used donkeys to get around in these trails, but nowadays in Pitigliano, the only donkey you see is a bronze monument they put up to them, to remember how key they were to life here when life was hard and comforts were expensive and there were no motors. now there are lots of motors, in fact one of our favorite events at one hill town, Civita de Bagnoregio, was that although no cars go in and out of this town, and it has a very long staircase up to it, a motorbike can go in, and out, lickety split in a tight curvy stepped runway that I would never think to come up or down on a bike.

Anyway, about Craig and driving... we went from Pitigliano to Sovana, a pretty little town a little touristified,... then down a lot of vaguely labeled country roads, accidentally going up to another hill town we had NO intention of visiting, where about six farmers, taking a day off, enjoyed the sight of us u turning our little car and going back on down the hill.... then through at least two other yellow-orange hills towns on our way north to Scansano, where we went to the wine festival Craig has just been writing about... then back down to Montemoreno, where we saw the gumless old ice cream cone eater and also a very interesting group of 3 women, all about fifty, at least 2 looking like women of a certain profession, one with a very interesting top of the head ponytail which then cascaded down on her breast, of mixed very white and very black hair... and elaborate makeup with eyebrows only she herself could have invented, and a little black and white polkadotty outfit, tight pants and high heels. Then we went to a very famous little town, Saturnia, which has sulfury hot springs that cascade down like something out of Dr Seuss, only jam jam packed with swimmers... then over hills and down plateaus again back to pitigliano, and up to a really neat very ghosty hill town called Sorano which is so high up a cliff above its narrow gorged river, it is almost like being on the edge of the grand canyon.

When I first read about Pitigliano and its neighbor towns I expected something really crumbly and quaint, but its not like that. the towns have truly ancient centers, but they are well restored and laden with cool pots of flowers and herbs and lots of wrought iron. local folks look totally normal, the kids are riding the same bikes and scooters as american middle class kids, people dress fashionably, and the older ladies dont go around in black or anything like that, they wear nice flowered dressed and some elegant jackets and sweaters and it would be nice to talk with some of them, to find out howzit.