Off to Monteriggioni & Siena

Ok, let's try to catch up. Still working from the crackberry so please excuse typos. Today is Tuesday and we're off for Siena. Again we took backroads to find adventures.

Collette really wanted to stop at a little medieval town she'd read about called Monteriggioni. It is supposed to only take five minutes to walk from one end to another. We had a cappuccino in the piazza while we watched a preschool group sing an Italian song.

Not much time to rest as we're of to Siena. See the comments from Kacey. Parking was indeed a nightmare. We followed Rick Steves' suggestion for finding parking. It took over 30 minutes to find a spot. And the worry of the photo tickets when driving in the wrong area was extremely stressful. Did we mention that we purchased treasures from the glass vendor in Volterra? A couple from the wine tasting tour at Dievole told us about the Mail Boxes, Etc. in Siena where we could ship our treasures home. We were on a mission to find Mail Boxes. (The couple made it sound a lot easier to find the shop than it turned out to be!) After wandering the streets for quite some time, we finally found it. Guess what? Closed for siesta. Luckily, we weren't too far from the Campo so we stopped for lunch. We knew this would be a costly meal since we were looking right at the Piazza del Campo. The service was okay. Food was was fine, but spendy. The waiter tried to short change by 20+euro (like we wouldn't notice?). They finally brought the right change. Very expensive city...even had to pay to use the restroom. We won't even go into the cost of the Mail Boxes, Etc. I think Tom is still trying to survive the heart attack from the cost of the bill.


The city itself is very cool. Very medieval looking. We decided to head over to the Duomo (pictured here). It is so beautiful (even more than Florence). There was a man playing a violin out front. So beautiful! Enough to calm us all down.


Can you believe that Siena has a wine museum called Enoteca Italiana? That's not the surprising part. What we found amazing is that vintners send in cases of wine to museum (no cost to the museum) and the museum sells the wine. How's that for a business venture? We have all decided that Nobile de Montipulciano is one of our favs. Especially the reserva.


Headed back to San Gimi for dinner. Boy, what a day!
Tom, Theresa, Tino & Collette

ps...no baby yet!