A medieval reenactment of some kind that was going on in Volterra. I didn’t get any good pictures, it was so crowded there.

Tenth day of travel, second day of the walking tour

Monday the second of June, and we got up early enough to have breakfast and be out of the hotel by 8:50, so that we could arrive at Volterra suitably early.

As usual, I stopped before getting on the bus to snap a shot of what I kept thinking of as a typical Tuscan view, which you see to the right. (Big image, small.) The day was cloudy, and for the most part my pictures this day lack the snap of sunlit contrast, for all the Photoshop fiddling that I’ve tried.

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We started with a bus ride, and then walked for quite a while along a country lane, with lots of nice vews, as you see left and right, and lots of vegetation to ask about, like the flower below.

The walk continued to an establishment called Il Palagione, it’s some kind of educational center, where lots of German art students work. We got coffee and snacks, and some of our number spent quite a bit of effort learning the various Italian codes for getting the right quantity of milk in a cup of coffee. I have to confess that I didn’t pay much attention, since I prefer it black.

From there we bussed directly to Volterra, a town that’s center of artisanry in alabaster. And it’s an Etruscan town as well. This was a day for a “free lunch”, which means that it wasn’t paid for by Country Walkers. Mark and I and Joanna found a crowded inexpensive place—it would have been a lot less crowded if there hadn’t been enough rain pouring down to prevent people from eating outside under the umbrellas. As I recall, the food was nothing to write home to mother about, but the service was not too bad; others of our group ate at the same place and complained bitterly about the service, though.

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Then the three of us stopped into an alabaster shop, and Joanna and Mark made some purchases: Mark got three little owls for some girls we know. Next, we met up with Angelica, and she took us through the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci, started by a local cleric who had a collecting hobby and left his collection to the town. This was a really interesting place, something not to miss for anybody visiting Volterra. No photographs, of course.

Somewhere along the line, still in Volterra, I managed to take the four pictures in the block to the left. The top two show excavations of Roman ruins, which we could look down upon. In the right one you can see the town’s theater.

The left picture in the bottom row is just one of the many fine Tuscan vistas I was always shooting. The atmosphere is so great there! And I shot the picture of the houses piled up on each other in such a medieval fashion because I liked the sight of all the television antennas and dishes surmounting them.

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It was quite a while before we collected the others, but when we finally did, we got bussing on our way back to San Gimignano. I wrote up my journal before the memorable dinner we had that night, and for some reason did not revisit the evening when I wrote journal the next day. You’ll have to go to Mark’s page for today to get a full rundown on that.

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But my picture-taking wasn’t over when we left Volterra. On the walk up from where the bus left us off, I took a bunch of crowd pictures—they’re in the block to the right—concentrating on the great Italian faces all around us.

Dinner was to be at a late hour, and the four pictures in the block to the left were taken as Mark and I wandered around San Gimignano seeing what we could see.

The picture below was taken in the Piazza del Duomo of San Gimignano. I think this square is more interesting from an architectural standpoint than the Piazza della Cisterna.

Multiple conversations in San Gimignano’s Piazza del Duomo