Italy Trip Day 2 - Montefalco & Deruta

We woke up jet-lag early, and were greeted with another grey wet Umbrian day. We enjoyed our first breakfast at the inn, which consisted of meats, cheese, pastry, fruit and cereal. It was included in the incredibly low price of our room, 180 euro a night, but did get boring after about the third day. After loading up our tourist gadgets (two still cameras, a video camera and a gps) we headed to our first hill town, Montefalco. The town is very small, but picturesque, even in the rain (the main piazza is shown above).

We explored the side streets for a while, taking a ton of pictures with our new SLR camera (which we were still learning how to work), and then took refuge from the rain in a tiny restaurant called L'Alchimista. We started with an antipasti of cured meats and cheese and a melted cheese and truffle concoction. We then moved on to pasta, ravioli with pea puree and rabbit sauce for me (picture below), and wild boar tagliatelle for Steve. We shared a bottle of Sagrantino di Montefalco, which was the first time Steve or I ever tried this type of wine. We fell in love!

After Montefalco, we moved on to Deruta to look at the town's famous hand-painted ceramics. We bought some wonderful pieces from one of the shops, and then, since we had a couple hours to kill before our dinner reservation, we stopped in Perugia to buy some chocolate. For dinner, we ate one of the best meals of the entire trip, at L'Antico Forziere, near Deruta. We had scrambled eggs with truffle, a bright green and amazingly flavorful broad bean risotto (shown below), and for secondi, pork and beef, each with roasted potatoes. We had another bottle of Sagrantino, and a chocolate and pear crepe for dessert. Start to finish, we now agree that this was probably our favorite meal, and given the delights awaiting us in other towns to come, that's really saying something!