Tuscany Day Tour - Montepulciano and Siena, and Back Home

Back to back postings on the same day. Be sure to read about Pisa and Chainti on my earlier post. 

Friday October 31st:

We decided that we wanted to see the area famous for the setting of several movies. The south east part of Tuscany has been used for films like The Gladiator, Under the Tuscan Sun, The English Patient, and others. The town square of Montepulciano was the setting for the climax scene of the second movie in the Twilight series, New Moon. As Cindy is an American female thirty something mom, she is likely to be a big fan of this series of books and movies. She is in fact Team Edward and was very excited to see this town square. 

So the scene is a little bit of a Romeo and Juliet rip off. Edward, the vampire, thinks the love of his life Bella, a human, is dead. He does not want to live but he cannot kill himself, that is a vampire rule, so he is going to reveal himself to the humans in the town of Volterra where the vampire council still lives. The council will have no choice but to kill Edward for revealing himself. Above is my picture of the church, below is from the movie set. So Manuele was one of the extras wearing the red robes in the movie. The festival that was happening in the movie was the celebration of the town getting rid of all of the vampires. In the movie all of the attention is in the direction of the church and the festival activities. 

Edward is planning to reveal himself coming out of the door of the white building adjacent to the church. See, when a vampire comes out in the sun the skin sparkles like diamonds. At high noon he stepped out to show everyone that he was a vampire. 

As the people continue to look towards the church Bella arrives just in time to show Edward that she is still alive. Only one little girl noticed Edward sparkling before Bella pushes him back into the shade. Below Cindy is in front of this door. The next scene takes place inside of this same building. They painted it a different color for the movie and today they have a couple of very small patches of the movie wall color left to show tourists. In the earlier scene Bella has to climb into a fountain in the middle of the square in order to get far enough away from the mass of red robed people to find Edward in the crowd. That fountain was a prop and was only there for the filming of the scene.

As you can see, there is no fountain in the middle of the square. 

As the movie continues Edward and Bella and others are taken to the underground lair of the Volterra council to answer for what has happened. One of these stair corridors was used in the movie as the entrance to the Volterra.

As usual Manuele had a plan. While he was showing us the New Moon sites he was also leading us to a very cool underground wine cellar. These huge barrels were aging a local wine. The below picture does not capture the personality of this room.

He continues to lead us down more and more stairs and through these narrow passages. The one above has a decoration of wine bottles making an arch along one part of the ceiling. We came across this old well in a room that was part of an old crypt. Very strange and a little unnerving I thought.

We kept walking and walking in this underground area when we ended up in the tasting room of this winery. Outside was the current ground level coming out of the side of the hill. I really enjoyed this part of the tour. It was a place that we would have never found or known about. I am not really sure that we were supposed to be down there, but that is the advantage of a guide in his home town.

We had a quick late morning wine tasting and made our way back up the hill.

The shadows were a bit better by this time of the day so I got a few more pictures of the square. 

By now I had started an unplanned series of pictures of the kids in front of these medieval wells. I asked the kids what the symbol on the crest represented. The six round balls. Both of them remembered from our day in Florence that is was the symbol of the Medici family.

Manuele was at it again. He brought us into the workshop of this old man. Walking in I was worried that he was going to be grumpy about us walking in to his shop while he was working. It turned out to be one of the greatest family experiences of the trip. If you Google Rameria Mazzetti you will get results that mostly call him Renowned Rameria Mazzetti. I could tell within seconds that he was a grandpa and that he loved kids. The coolest thing about it was how well Manuele handled the scene. Mr. Mazzetti only spoke Italian. He would look at the kids or at us and speak Italian. Manuele was off to the side translating seamlessly as part of the conversation. The whole thing flowed easily thanks to Manuele. When we walked in he was putting a bend into a ladle that he was making for a chef in California. Then as he started talking to us he was showing us some of his work and things related to copper. He put a large bowl over our head and hit it with a hammer. You could feel heat on your head generated by the vibration of the hammer impact on the bowl. He showed us a small thick piece of copper and the process to get that small piece formed into a much larger, thinner bowl. This went on for a long time to the point where other people walking by the shop came in and started watching.

After the demonstration he grabbed a raw piece of copper and started making impressions on it. He was telling a love story in Italian. John and Cindy met and their hearts exploded into one as they married on June 8th 1996. Soon after two kids came along named David and Katherine. He made impressions for a couple of other kids, but that ain't happening. Good thought though. Below was the finished work. Our anniversary is in the middle, represented with the day, then month, then year as they do it in Europe. He put his seal on it and handed it to us with no expectation for payment or tip. I still cannot get used to that.

It turns out that all of these free demonstrations have resulted in an investment of some sort. Mr. Mazzetti got more than any of the other artisans that we have visited. That fancy copper wine chiller that he is holding is now sitting on a shelf in Germany along with some other copper trinkets from his shop. Very, very cool experience. 

This was the secret passage that led us to his retail shop on another street. Before the copper demonstration we were planning on leaving Montepulciano to head towards Sienna for lunch. We spent so long at the shop that we managed to hang around long enough to eat at a burger place that is owned by a friend of Manuele. Man am I glad that we stayed. This might have been the best meal of the trip.

Manuele picked out a wine for us and told us about these burgers. They are made fresh from the white Chianina cattle of the region. Mine also had the pecorino sheep cheese that was made locally. I cannot even put into words how great this burger was. Cindy and Hutch ordered different versions but also seemed to love it as much as I did.

After lunch went headed in the direction of Sienna. We stopped in the town of Pienza famous for the the birthplace of Pope Pius II. This church was one stop in the town. It is over 1000 years old. Manuele took us in and we walked to the back and down some stairs underneath. 

He also stopped here to show us this view. It was the first glimpse that we had related to Gladiator. This road is used in the scene where the Gladiator is returning home, to Spain. These movies you can never trust. The Volterra scene in New Moon was filmed in Montepulciano, not the real town of Volterra. Now the "Spaniard" from Gladiator was going home to Spain in the middle of Tuscany Italy.

Another well in the series, this one in the town of Pienza. We walked around the town for a bit. It was neat because you could walk on top of the city wall and get some great views. We did a little window shopping and got some gelato from a shop that Manuele recommended. 

The next stop was at a different house along the road towards Sienna. Here we saw the twin rows of Cypress trees leading up to the home of the Gladiator. If you are a fan of the movie you will recognize this scene, even though it is only in the movie for a few seconds. Cindy posted it to Facebook and immediately people recognized it. 

Manuele called this the secondary gate to this estate. This is the gate just off of the road. I was thrilled to get the opportunity to see this site. It was only after returning home that I realized the road we saw in Pienza and this house are two completely different locations. More movie magic. 

Finally we made it to Siena. I don't think I have talked much about how much benefit we got having a licensed guide drive us into the middle of these towns. All of these small towns are on top on hills and there is no public car access. Manuele had to dodge people with his van who were walking up these hills to get to the town center. He would drive us up there and drop us off. Siena was another time for this time and energy saving advantage. He drove us past the town center to the big cathedral and told us where we should walk.

The pictures do not do this place justice. It was all marble and very beautiful. The copper piece on top of the dome was made by none other than our new friend from Montepulciano.

Well series

We walked through the streets of Siena from the cathedral towards the big square.

We spent a little time walking around and looking. It was a great city but it was the end of another busy day at the end of a long trip. We found Manuele in the square to get our ride home.

It turned out that Manuele had another tour group the next morning that he was supposed to pick up in Florence early. Hutch needed to be in Florence to catch his flight to Paris to meet up with Robert and Lisa for that stage of his journey. Manuele dropped the Ferguson Four off in Certaldo and was nice enough to take Hutch to Florence where Robert and Lisa were staying overnight.

Cindy and I spent the rest of our evening on the top of our castle tower, huddled up with blankets drinking a bottle of Chianti Classico. This was our last evening in Italy. It also happened to be Halloween evening. Last year we were in Germany and we did not see much activity. The kids get to do some stuff at school before hand but no trick or treating. Here is Certaldo this was a very active evening. Especially up on the hill where so far we have not seen many people. There were kids dressed up in costumes and going door to door. The difference was they all had firecrackers. There was popping and whizzing or fireworks all around. We watched some of them from the tower walking down the street. I think that is they rang a buzzer and nobody answered they set off a loud bang or ten of them. That was the trick I suppose. We heard a large group of kids off in the distance at some gathering and the firecrackers went off over and over. I was surprised to see any Halloween activity even though it was much different than what I am used to in Texas.

The hopes for an uneventful trip home was dashed before we even got started. We found out that the train tracks between Austria and Germany had some sort of construction work. happening. We knew that we were going to have to get on a bus for part of the journey. That morning we left the castle and walked to the funicular. Let's see how many stages of travel we had on this day and what forms of transportation are included, okay. So far we have walking and funicular down the hill. I almost left my backpack on the bench outside of the funicular, but got it at the last minute. At the Certaldo train station we had to catch the regional train to Florence. In Florence we had to board the train that was going from Rome to Venice for just one stop. Florence to Bologna was this leg, and we actually had assigned seats. It was not easy with the four huge suitcases filled with wine, coffee mugs, spaghetti bowls, and other stuff. In Bologna we caught our EuroCity train that was supposed to take us to Munich. This is where we had a run in with these guys that act nice and give directions and try to help you with your luggage. Our kids have been trained to not let anyone carry their stuff and they did good. Cindy and I refused the help of these guys but they still followed. One of them ended up getting on the train behind this British lady. As she waited for us to move our luggage out of the way this guy tried to unzip her backpack. She stated yelling and he jumped off and ran away. She was pretty shaken up and was trying to get someone on the train to do something about those guys.

We got to settle in for a while on this train. We tried to get some food from the food car for the first time in all of our train travels. For some reason they had no electricity on the food car so we were relegated to cold food options. It was fine for Cindy and I but the kids were not happy. At some point in Austria we had to get off of the train to board buses for an hour long trip to Rosenheim Germany. You would think that they would have some sort of organized plan for this. You would be wrong. The buses were not there, when one did pull up it was bedlam. Eventually we got ourselves and our luggage on a bus and made it to Rosenheim. There we had to make our way to the train that was waiting to take us the last 45 minutes to Munich. This train had very few people and we even went to the food car again to get some warm food. This was the best idea ever. I was not looking forward to finally getting home only to be faced with figuring out something to eat after being done for 8 days. We got some warm food delivered to our cabin on the train and passed the remaining time eating our dinner. Now finally in Munich at the central train station we had to wait for our S1 to get to Unterschleissheim. It was a holiday in Germany so the trains were on a reduced schedule, every 40 minutes instead of 20. The S1 got us to the stop where I rode my bicycle home in the misty foggy darkness. You see we were supposed to be home 90 minutes earlier when I booked the train, still with some twilight left to ride the bicycle home. With the bus and construction delay it was dark. I did make it home got the car and picked up everyone at the station. Twelve hours later, five separate trains, one bus, a bicycle, car, and funicular with plenty of walking and luggage hauling in between we were back. We did not do much on Sunday.