Our Castle Away From Home

Breaking from the normal, this post is not sequential to the rest of the trip. I wanted to talk about the apartment where we stayed for five days while we toured around the rest of Tuscany. After leaving Verona we took a two hour train to Florence and changed to a regional train to get a little further south, right in the middle of the Tuscany area, in a little town called Certaldo. The Italian pronunciation sounds like CHERtaldo.

I used AirBnB to make the reservation. This is similar to Homeaway and other sites for vacation rental homes and apartments. Most hotels in Europe are small and do not accommodate four people, much less the five we had on this trip. After much looking and debate on where to stay this option popped up. It was described as a "real castle". All of the reviews were good and it described a private patio on top of the castle tower! The location was great and it was a castle, it had three bedrooms, what else do you need?

When we arrived at the small train station in the city of Certaldo we walked a couple of hundred meters to a town square. From there we could see Certaldo Alto, the part up on the hill. This is where our apartment/castle was located. All of Certaldo Alto is an unspoiled middle ages town with an outer wall for protection and several towers used to show how much money the people had.

We were hungry, in need of a WC, and not sure how we were going to get ourselves and our luggage up the hill. It was after noon on a Monday, nothing was open. It took a while to find the kids a WC, then we found a pizza place with ready make by the slice options. We sat down and ate, but we were still a couple of hours before check in time.

It turns out there was a funicular that went up the hill every fifteen minutes. The entrance was in the square where we were eating. I called the apartment people who made arrangements for someone to meet us at the top of the funicular to let us in early.

The apartment owner told us we would need to take a taxi from the train station. I was surprised by how easy it was to walk to the funicular, once to the top it was only a few steps to the huge wooden door entrance to the castle.

The door had a remote control to open it. The three windows above the door and the tower to the right was our apartment. As the door opened you stepped into this open courtyard area. 

You have to climb a flight of very steep and tall steps to get to the entrance of the apartment. The first living area had this great Gothic ceiling finished and painted in parts. 

With the chilly evenings we actually spent a lot of time in this room. It also happened to be about the only place that the WiFi signal worked, so there was that too. This room was also the lower part of the tower. Above was the room where the kids slept, and above that was the outdoor patio area.

From that living area you stepped up out of the tower section into the structure built out from the wall, above the wood door. The rest of the apartment was the exposed wood beam ceilings like we saw in Venice. It was nice to look at, but tall people are not the best for this ceiling. These middle age beams are very solid.  

This is the staircase to the next level. It looks pretty normal until you get to the top left of the picture. The nice normal stairs turn in to more of a ladder type structure as you climb back in to the tower and the bedroom up there. You can only see about three of the dozen steps to get to that next level. 

Once you are in that bedroom there is another set of steps to get to the top of the tower. At the top you open a door above your head to step outside to the top. It took a significant effort to get here, but the views were great. 

The colors and lighting change on these pictures because they were taken on different days and at various times of the day during our five days here.

Just across the street from our entrance was a great little wine shop. On our first evening I dropped in to try and find a bottle for the evening. Within seconds I was tasting several options. I ended up selecting a Chianti that turned out to be one of our favorite wines. We had to get another bottle later in the week. The little shop also had some little sweet crunchy biscuit things. One with chocolate and other with various nuts. We snacked on those during the long days of our tours for the rest of the week. 

We were only a few kilometers from the city of San Gimignano seen above and below in the distance. This is a common stop on the tourist tour since this town still has many of the middle ages towers on the skyline. 

Above is part of the town of Certaldo with the Chianti region in the distance. Below is one of the restaurants with ivy changing into fall colors.

Mondays in Italy is sometimes tough to find an open restaurant. That is even more true when you are on top of a hill in a non touristy town. There was nobody around that first evening. I had to do a little bit of walking around, but we eventually found a restaurant open. The Taverna Antica Fonte Da I' Pacino. This was a memorable meal since the food and the wine was so good. We all enjoyed our meal and had a fabulous dessert. It was so good that we asked for reservations for Thursday night too. It was a shame to give up on experiencing new restaurants each night, but we had found a keeper close to our castle. It was nice to have a sure thing lined up. It turned out that we did not do a lot of restaurant searching for our evening meals. Besides the Antica Fonte on Monday and Thursday we brought home really yummy pizza from a place even closer to our castle on the other evenings. It was a cool pizzeria in a medieval building with the arched ceilings. The food was good, it was cheap, and a very handy option after our long days of touring.

One evening after dinner the kids were resting and playing. The adults dragged blankets, wine glasses, a nice Chianti, and ourselves up the stairs to the tower top.

It was a little chilly, but not miserable by any means. The orange crescent moon was low in the sky when we first got out there. Soon after this photo the moon disappeared behind a weird fog that was all around us, but not too far above the horizon. Looking up into the sky you could still see stars above, but a little lower the clouds and mist completely blacked out the moon.

Cindy and I spent one more evening in the dark with another bottle of wine on our last evening. Hutch was in Florence that evening with his other daughter joining them for Paris as his next stop. Cindy did not last too long on the patio as the temperatures dropped, but it was long enough to enjoy our wine.

Just a few more pics from our tower. The kids say this has been their favorite place to stay in all of our travels. I think it might be my favorite too. We found a little place with no tourists that happened to be in the middle of the region that we were touring, and it was a castle!! So cool. The price tag was not bad either. We would have spent a lot more for a accommodation in Florence or Siena that would have been smaller and not nearly as cool. 

Our tour guide was able to pick us up right outside our door each day. It was so nice to walk out the door and have your ride sitting there ready to go. Up next we will have the pictures and descriptions of our day tours with Manuele along with our trip to explore Florence with Elena.