Sylvia's Scenario

As we headed south on our Best of Italy tour, we visited two more hill towns in Umbria or "green heart of Italy", a region of Italy known for it's wines and olive oil.  This is the only landlocked region in Italy and it's geographical center.  We loved all the vineyards here and seeing olives growing on the trees.  In fact, we stayed at an organic farm and winery called  Altarocca Wine Resort  that is a working family winery and we got the full tour, including wine tasting. They are a small, organic winery producing about 40,000 bottles per yea r. (Small for Italy's standards) All their grapes and olives for their olive oil are picked by hand and some of them were being harvested while we were there.  They produce three types of white wine and three types of red wine here. For our wine tasting, we tasted two white wines and two red wines including a 2011 Chardonnay, a 2015 Red Wine called Labrato ($18.00/b...

We sadly left lovely Cinque Terre and started on our adventure to Tuscany.  Our first stop was the quaint, little town of Lucca. Lucca has a most impressive wall surrounding the town even though it has not been in a war since 1430.  (Maybe that's why?)  The wall seems to keep out the stress of the modern world, as well as a lot of traffic.  The locals are very protective of their wall, which they enjoy like a community roof garden.   You can easily walk around the 2.5 mile city wall or rent bicycles which a lot of people do. We had a nice relaxing time here strolling around the town and enjoying it's many squares with cute shops and cafes. The center of town is Piazza San Michele that was a forum in Roman times.  It is dominated by the Church of San Michele with the archangel Michael standing above ready to flap his wings. We got a nice, simple lunch of small, focaccia sandwiches with our soon becoming-favorite b...