Italy Trip Day 12 - Cooking Class

We had a lazy morning, then went back to La Porta in Monticchiello for lunch. This time we had the crostini misti (simple, but tasty, and it's amazing how consistently great the liver pate is in Tuscany, we were becoming addicted) and then the same two pastas we had before (I know, we are boring), and another 500ml of house red.

We got back to La Bandita and hung out on our patio until 4pm, when we had scheduled our cooking class with David. He was cooking fish that night, but because there were a big 16 of us for dinner, he had done a lot of the prep before we got there (for which he apologized profusely, normally preferring to allow his students to jump in and help more). He showed us how to filet a flounder and a red mullet (he makes it look SO easy!), then we got to work on making a flourless chocolate cake and chopping some of the veggies for dinner. A race between Steve and David shelling fava beans was over well before it started, Steve never had a chance. David is very funny and charismatic, and the cooking class went by way too fast. (Though David, if you ever read this, we're still waiting for those recipes you said you'd send us!) :-)

After enjoying the meats, cheeses and prosecco, we sat down to what turned out to be my favorite meal at La Bandita. We started with a scallop in the shell on top of creamed leeks (the best dish of the entire trip), a roasted sea truffle (it looked like a clam and was very good, pictured on right), the light and delicious filet of flounder with peas, and red mullet with potatoes, the second best dish of the night. The chocolate cake we made was also very tasty. We drank our second bottle of Gattavecchi with this dinner. After dinner, we hung out again for hours, talking with the other guests. This night we met a couple who live in our town back home in L.A., and we became fast friends. We've hung out with them since returning home, and have another evening on the books. Not sure if we would have had the experience of getting to know our fellow travelers so well if we had been staying at any other place.

Italy Trip Day 11 - S'Antimo & Ciacci Piccolomi Tour

This was a very busy day for us, we had booked ourselves with minutes to spare. Probably shouldn't do that again. We headed off to the S'Antimo abby near Sant'Angelo in Colle to hear the monks do their gregorian chants. It's an impressive and gorgeous structure (pictured left), and the monks' singing is something you just don't get to hear every day! But we barely made it in time, thanks to some unfortunate GPS misdirections (fortunately only happened once or twice)! After the prayer service, we rushed off to lunch at il Leccio, where the service was pleasant but sluggish (everything is cooked to order, so it's not their fault that we happened to be in a hurry), so we had to scarf down our lunch of liver crostini, spaghetti with tomato and pancetta sauce (very, very good) and gnocchi with pomodoro sauce (sweet and rich, but not enough time to enjoy it!), and two glasses of Brunello.

We then rushed to our tasting appointment at Ciacci Piccolomini d'Aragona, a winery specializing in Brunello. We were a few minutes late, but some others were even later than us, so after about 10 minutes, the guide started the tour without them. The facilities and grounds were beautiful, and much smaller and less commercial than Poggio Antico. The wine tasting was done at a long table, where we got to relax and munch on crackers while trying 4 different wines. The wines were all excellent and reasonably priced, so we bought another case here and had it shipped home (both cases of wine and the box of ceramics from Montepulciano made it back to the US in excellent shape about a week and a half after we returned).

We were pretty frazzled after all the rushing around we did, so after the tasting, we went back to La Bandita and enjoyed some more time on our patio listening to the tranquility and the occasional far-off sheep's bell. Too soon though, it was time for our drive back down the hill to Pienza for our dinner reservation at Da Fiorella, another one of the best restaurants of the trip.

The restaurant itself is very casual, as is the food and its presentation, but the dishes we ordered were outstanding, and the service from the two brothers who owned the restaurant was warm and friendly. One brother recommended a local wine, a blend, that was very good and reasonably priced. We ordered the pici with meat sauce (excellent, pictured above), ravioli with butter sauce (also excellent), sliced beef (very tender, and crucially not too dry), and thinly sliced pork with a mustard cream sauce (just delicious). We ended with a vanilla panna cotta with strawberries, which was just perfect (pictured on the right). This is definitely a place we would go back to on our next trip to Tuscany.

Italy Trip Day 10 - San Querico d'Orcia & Bagno Vignoni

After our first breakfast at La Bandita (croissant, very good granola, sheep milk yogurt, fruit and fresh squeezed OJ), we headed down the bumpy road to San Querico d'Orcia, a small town between Pienza and Montalcino. We visited a very pretty garden and park, and explored the side streets before heading out to our next stop, Bagno Vignoni (pictured left). This town has ancient hot springs where locals used to come and bathe, including St. Catherine of Siena, the co-patron saint of Italy. We had lunch here at a little rustic place called Il Loggiato, on a side street off the main square. We sat at one of the four outdoor tables, and enjoyed a simple lunch of bruschetta with tomatoes and basil, polenta with sausage and pecorino, beef carpaccio with gorgonzola fondue, and cinta senese (roast pork, the winner of the meal), and a carafe of house red.

We then went back to Pienza and picked up some items to make dinner in our kitchen at the Pigsty. We bought fresh pappardelle pasta and a couple of jars of local wild boar sauce, stopped for some gelato (I haven't mentioned it before, but this was pretty much a daily treat for us), and went back to La Bandita to enjoy the rest of the afternoon on our patio reading. We had a pre-dinner snack (pictured right) consisting of the three different pecorino cheeses we had bought from the surly cheese shopkeeper, honey, salami and pears. Very tasty. For dinner we made the pasta and sauce we had bought in Pienza (the sauce was great, so we bought more the next day to take home with us), and a bottle of the Gattavecchi wine we carried with us from Montepulciano. We finished with biscotti and dessert wine, which was supplied free of charge from Francesca, one of La Bandita's diligent managers.

I should take a minute to sing the praises of the staff at La Bandita. They really make this place special. Francesca and Simone are a couple, and usually work different shifts, but are often in charge of making sure everything runs smoothly. Francesca was a master planner also. I gave her a list of the restaurants I wanted to try and the activities we were interested in, and in about an hour she came back with a written itinerary for the next five days, complete with reservations for every meal, a winery tour, and suggestions of other places to go that we hadn't known about. We loved her! Paula and Paulo work either with Simone or Francesca, or by themselves sometimes, and were always offering to assist us with something. Paula saw my husband go toward the little room with the washing machine with a bag of clothes, and she rushed up and took the bag from him. A short while later she returned with our clean clothes in a bag expertly folded. Now that's service!

Italy Trip Day 9 - Pienza and La Bandita

We bid goodbye to Cinzia at La Locanda di San Francesco after a late breakfast, and departed for Pienza. We had heard that Pienza had more cheese tasting shops than wine tasting places, so we were eager to taste some of the local varieties of pecorino. We picked a place based on our guidebook that turned out to be the wrong choice. The woman who ran the shop was gruff, rude and obviously didn't want to give us samples (oddly, even though we asked her if we could taste some in Italian, she replied by saying that the shop had hundreds of varieties, and it would be impossible to taste them all)!

Eventually she warmed up, and the cheeses she gave us (which had been set aside for this purpose, so I don't know why she acted as if we were asking for something out of the ordinary) were quite good, so even though we didn't like her, we bought three different types of pecorino. We also bought some local wild boar salami and some honey at a nearby shop, since I knew we would have a kitchen at our next inn, La Bandita, and I wanted to have some snacks handy.

We snagged a table outside at the garden-esque Latte di Luna for lunch (shown on left, under the umbrellas), and took in the beautiful sunny day, the rain and clouds at this point a thing of the past. We ordered the crostini of the house (three toasted pieces of bread with different toppings, delicious), the gnocchi with meat ragu for me (very good) and the pici with cingiale ragu for Steve (even better), and our now traditional 500ml carafe of red wine.

(After lunch we were strolling through town and saw a wedding party on the street. We thought, how great, a traditional Italian wedding! Then the bride spoke, and she was unmistakably American.)



La Bandita is not the easiest place to find. As we found out, there are two windy, hillside access roads that you can take to get there, one to the east that takes you up a bumpy, difficult-but-doable unpaved road, and one to the west which takes you on a was-that-the-muffler-scraping, less-doable unpaved road. We only did the western road once, and it was brutal. (I'm surprised the underside of our Ford Fiesta rental survived it.)

Whichever way you make it there, you will not be disappointed by La Bandita. The property sits astride a hill in a nature preserve, surrounded by lush green hills, complete with flocks of grazing sheep. It is truly breathtaking being up there looking out over the hills and valleys below. The property itself is beautifully designed. The grounds are lovely, and the main house and "Pigsty" suite, where we stayed, are designed to look like an ancient farm house, yet extremely modern on the inside. I think there are 8 rooms total, including the separate suite where we stayed, called the Pigsty because that's exactly what it was before this owner's renovations!

The Pigsty (seen below) is a great way to go if you can get it. We stayed in this amazing suite for 6 nights. It boasts a kitchen/living area with a little fridge, cooktop, table for four, and a couch, a bedroom with a beautiful canopy type bed, and a massive bathroom with a large open blue shower with a rain shower head and a bathtub that fits two comfortably. The bath products are very nice, and full-size, which came in handy since we were staying so long. The fridge was stocked with sodas, water and wine, all of which (except for the wine) was complimentary! The suite also has its own private patio facing west for sunsets, with a table and 4 chairs and a little outdoor couch and coffee table. We spent a lot of time on that patio enjoying the view and the sounds of the bells worn by the sheep grazing nearby. The sheep are so cute!


The main house has 5 bedrooms on the top floor, a couple of bedrooms on the bottom floor, and a spacious living room with sofas, chairs, a public laptop, stereo with record collection, and even an iPad to play with. The huge kitchen is presided over by David, exclusively the chef for La Bandita, a fine wisecracking Scot. David has some serious skills. He makes dinner every night (except on Mondays) for those guests who don't want to venture down the hill at night to nearby towns for dinner. David's dinners are amazing, multi-course extravaganzas, which you can have with wine that has been hand-selected by John, the owner of La Bandita. Everything is on the honor system here, which means that if you take a bottle of wine from their collection, you just write it down on the pad of paper near the kitchen and the price gets added to your bill at the end. All of the wine is marked with little stickers displaying the price. John has a great collection, and keeps the prices reasonable, especially for the quality of wines he offers.

The first night at La Bandita, we decided to eat there, which was a perfect choice. The dinner experience starts at around 7:30, when David puts out some cured meat, delicious pecorino, honey and veggies, and Francesca or Paula starts serving prosecco. This lasts until around sunset, and then we all take our seats at a long table in the main room (I hear they have dinners mostly outside in the summer, but because of all the rain, it was still a little cool at night during our stay there). There were 10 others at dinner that night, and we became fast friends with those around us. I think because it feels like you are staying at a friend's house instead of an inn, people are more friendly. Almost everyone introduced themselves as soon as they saw us, and we ended up chatting with everyone throughout the day and during the meals.

Dinner the first night consisted of zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta cheese (very tasty), pappardelle with white ragu (I think it had rabbit meat; delicious), bistecca alla Fiorentina (similar preparation to Osteria delle Acquachetta, and equally as good), and roasted peaches for dessert. We had a brunello from John's collection which was very good, and a bargain at 50 euro. Dinner itself was 40 per person, and was added to the bill at the end of our stay, just like the wine.



After finishing dinner, we stayed and talked to the other guests well into the night, and eventually went back to our slice of heaven to sleep. Now, it turns out we were very lucky that we booked the Pigsty suite, not only because it was so beautiful and private, but because there were two couples staying at the inn for our first 4 nights that had small children, and I heard from the other guests that the babies' cries could be heard in the early morning from the other rooms. Since we were in our own separate structure, we didn't hear anything at all.

Italy Trip Day 8 - Montepulciano

We gave our car a break, and stayed in Montepulciano all day. In the morning we did a ton of shopping. One of the places we stopped at was a ceramics shop called Creazioni d'Arte. This place just looked like a quaint little storefront from the outside, but those who wander into the back stairwell discover a whole other world! One flight of stairs leads to a dirt-walled cave, with another, far wider set of stairs below, which goes down and down, like Alice in Wonderland, room after cavernous room, all filled with ceramics for sale! Turns out, the owner had recently excavated all of this, stairs and rooms dating back to the pre-Roman (Etruscan) period, and decided to use the caves to expand his shop! It was a very cool experience. And the pottery was some of the prettiest we had seen. We bought a ton here, and had it all shipped home. After that we visited and visited the winery tasting room of Gattavecchi, which also boasted low ceiling caves under ground. The wines were very good, and we bought two bottles to drink during the rest of our trip.

By this time we were very hungry and stopped in at a place that seemed full of people every time we walked by, Osteria del Conte. Since it had finally stopped raining, we were able to sit at one of the few outdoor table and people watch. We had the house antipasti plate, which consisted of different crostini, cured meats and cheese (one of our favorite antipasti plates of the trip), I then had the tagliatelle with cingiale sauce and Steve had the pici with meat ragu. Both pastas were simple but flavorful, seemingly a trademark of Tuscan food. We washed it down with another 500ml carafe of house wine.

After lunch, we did more shopping, and again walked all the way down the hill and back again (we definitely worked off some of that lunch!). Since this was our last full day in Montepulciano, we wanted to make sure we'd peeked into all the churches and seen all the important buildings. Once back up the hill, we headed for the wine bar at La Locanda again, and enjoyed our last Montepulciano sunset.

We had a late dinner reservation (9:15, even though we booked a month ahead... popular joint!) at the famous Osteria della Acquachetta. It was written up recently in the New York Times, and it definitely doesn't hurt for customers. The place was hopping when we arrived, and we were led to the end of one of the two 30-foot common tables, covered with butcher paper. (Steve and I sat across from each other, but we were close enough to the couple next to us that we could have eaten off their plates by barely moving our arms!).

The long narrow corridor-like restaurant ends in a set of steps that leads to the kitchen through an open archway. In the center of that arch, at the top of the steps, sits the spotlighted king of this particular castle: the butcher's block, with a torso-like slab of cow meat, from which all orders are summarily chopped by the ponytailed owner/manager, wielding a machete-like cleaver. The pounding of his weapon can be heard by all above the din of conversation as more meat falls every few minutes, and it draws the tourists and their cameras to the back of the room like paparazzi. The beef and its executioner is the star of this show.

The menu informed us that there were a couple of other things we should know about the restaurant. First, unless you order a bottle of wine, you get only one glass per person, which you then have to use for both water and wine (Steve and I used one of our glasses for water, one for the house wine, and just shared). Second, the meat is cut to order, priced by the kilo, and only served rare.

We had heard from several places and the New York Times that the specialty of the house is the Fiorentina, a massive porterhouse steak. It's what they're known for, it's excellent, so we decided to go for it. The waitress, a tattooed Italian gal who spoke very little English, signaled by repeating "Fiorentina" several times and motioning with her hands that she thought it might be too much steak for two simple American tourists. The owner/executioner walked over, he spoke NO English, but seemingly tried to warn us, the Fiorentina is molto, molto grande. We were undeterred.

We also ordered liver crostini and a simple starter salad of arugula, pecorino and pears. The star is the meat, though, the rest is formality.

Once the cleaver has fallen, your piece is deftly scooped up and hustled over on butcher paper for inspection. The Executioner scrawls a few figures in front of you on your table. This is the weight, times a certain set amount, and therefore the price of your order. Ours was 1.7 kilos, or for the Americans, about 4 pounds! Even our Italian neighbors at the table rolled their eyes at the Americans' folly. But we were in for the ride now, no turning back, so we nodded our assent, muttered something in Italian, we think, and the steak goes back to the kitchen for preparation.

Quicker than you would think possible with that size piece of meat, the steak is sizzling on your table, cooked to rare salty perfection, beautifully browned on top and bottom, a bit more red than pink inside. Our Italian neighbors snapped a picture. The waitress seemed to smirk. The gauntlet had been thrown, and Steve knew he had to finish the steak. (Seemingly, most couples didn't get the Fiorentina, only bigger parties. But we were involved now, no turning back!) The seasoning was perfect, the flavor was excellent, and the meat never seemed to get too cold. Rare meat has never tasted this good, surely.

Carrie couldn't eat much more than the filet, but Steve, in bold defense of our American reputation, devoured nearly the whole thing. Seemingly walking out a bit taller than when he came in, his pride protected, he did mention feeling a touch bloated and exhausted later that night. Gee, I wonder why!

Italy Trip Day 7 - Poggio Antico Tour

We got up early and after breakfast headed to Poggio Antico winery outside Montalcino, a 45-minute drive. This was our first experience with Brunello of the trip, and it turns out we picked well, as Poggio Antico's brunellos are always highly rated. We took a tour with about 8 other people, and were shown their beautiful grounds and state of the art wine-making facilities. It did feel a little more modern and corporate here than Avignonesi, but we enjoyed the informative tour and the incredible wines we tried. We shipped home a case of mostly brunellos (and I was later very pleased to see that two of the bottles I bought had been written up in the latest Wine Spectator as highly recommended, at 96 points)! I have to wait a while before drinking it, but I'm sure it will be worth it!

I really wanted to have lunch at the winery's restaurant, but it was closed for remodeling, so the winery recommended we dine at a nearby restaurant called Boccon di Vino. They had made reservations for us, and it turns out that they had an arrangement with the restaurant to showcase certain dishes with Poggio Antico wines, I think as a way to make up for the fact that the winery's own restaurant was closed. The views from the restaurant were stunning, and I wished it had been warmer so that we could have sat outside. Still too windy and overcast to be pleasant. The food was as wonderful as the view. We had a bottle of Poggio Antico brunello riserva, 2003 (incredible), shared two antipasti (a delicious chicken liver crostini, shown on the top left above) and an amazing crispy bread shell with bacon and cheese), then I had the gnocchi with cheese and truffle sauce (shown to the right) and Steve had a luscious papardelle with chianina sauce. (Chianina showed up a lot on menus in Tuscany. We found out later it is a breed of cow that is huge and white. Very tasty.)

After lunch, we went back to Montepulciano and did some more "exploring". We'd brought our brand-new iPad on the trip, and we thought that wi-fi would be plentiful, but we were sorely mistaken! Wi-fi is something of a rare delicacy in Italy, as it turns out, thanks to some onerous anti-terrorism laws restricting public access to networks! And 3G (cellular data) works well, but once your iPad 3G account runs dry, you must have internet access via wi-fi in order to add more! Suffice it to say, we found wi-fi in a computer store, and persuaded them to let us use it! (THEN, of course, after walking all over town and setting up a new 3G account, we found out that Locanda di San Francesco DOES have wi-fi. But they don't advertise it, you have to ask...)

After our adventure, we had our now-traditional drink at the wine bar at sunset then got ready for dinner. We had heard a lot about the restaurant, Le Logge del Vignola, and it did not disappoint. This place was special, from the decor, to the service and food; I'd definitely recommend this place for a birthday, anniversary, or romantic date night. We had the tasting menu with wine pairings here, which consisted of a deliciously smooth liver pate that was almost too beautiful to cut into, paired with a late harvest white, a cannoli with wonderful rich cingiale sauce paired with a Rosso di Montalcino, a very tender and tasty lamb chop with zucchini tart paired with a Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, and a chocolate cigar filled with mousse, with a side of cotton candy and a glass of rum (picture above). This meal was probably one of the most expensive of our trip, but well worth it!

Italy Trip Day 6 - Avignonesi Winery Tour & Montepulciano

The rain was back again after our one-day sun visitation, but we were excited to get up and start our day, since after breakfast we were headed to our first winery tour. Breakfast at the Locanda was a lot like the breakfast at Capricci di Merion, cereal, fruit, pastries, etc. There was a good selection, and it filled us up until lunch. The winery we visited this day is called Avignonesi, a producer of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, on the way to Cortona. The grounds and caverns of the winery were beautiful, and the tour friendly and informative, but the best part of the day was lunch, served at a "Common Table" (a long table where everyone sits together).

I've posted a picture of the full menu above (which you can click on to make it bigger); our favorites were the pasta and the pork (picture of pasta at right). The wines they paired with each course (and which they kept on generously pouring, until we had to slow down our drinking!) were quite good as well. Much more than a token add-on after the tour, lunch was a high point of the day, a truly memorable meal!

At the end, we paired up with a young couple next to us to try both types of the vin santo dessert wine. This is some serious wine. It ages for 10 years in small oak barrels after the grapes are dried on mats for about 6 months. The result is something that resembles thick maple syrup in viscosity, with a very sweet, port-like taste. Avignonesi is known for their vin santo, they make a white and a red variety, and they sell for about €200 (!), with the white being slightly cheaper than the red. Apparently, their vin santo is always rated one of the top three dessert wines in the world. A small pour costs 25 euro for the white, 30 euro for the red. Both were fantastic, and I'm glad we were able to have that experience.

After taking a nap (all that wine made us sleepy!) and watching the sunset from the wine bar again, we went to a very casual place in town that was recommended by Cinzia called Trattoria Cagnano. This is a very big, very cheap and very crowded restaurant, with good-but-not-great examples of all the Tuscan favorites. Tonight we were sharing the restaurant with what appeared to be an American college orchestra on tour, so drunk 20-year-olds bounded all over the place. Lively, and never dull, though perhaps not the most authentic Montepulciano experience! We again had cinghiale (wild boar), this time cooked in Vino Nobile sauce over polenta (good, but not great), and a pizza with prosciutto and mushrooms (also pretty good, both pictured above). We shared another bottle of local Vino Nobile with dinner, and had tiramisu for dessert.