Montepulciano and Pienza

Hi everyone!

I'm tired todayyyy. I think the weather is making me sleepy. It was nice yesterday and sunny, but today it's cloudy and rainy and gloomy. It also might be gloomy my entire apartment is sick... we all have some sort of illness. Me and one other of us are getting over the flu (we think), one has a cold and one might have bronchitis. Woo. Also, it seems like the entire Italian population has the plague right now, so we might get it from someone else. Apparently a month after being in a new place is when you start to catch the bacteria and get sick. Wash your hands people! This has been a PSA from Logan.

So, this past weekend (2/28) I had a day trip to Montepulciano and Pienza- two small medieval cities about two hours away from Florence. This was a mandatory field trip for a whole bunch of classes at FUA, I think there was about 5 or 6 busloads of people. Two of my roommates went with me, but were on other buses because they came through their wine tasting class, while I went through my architecture class. We had another early call time in the morning for the bus, and then half of the busses went to Montepulciano while the other half went to Pienza, because the cities were too small to have us all there at one time.

We had the wine tasting first; so we walked down a large hill and had a tour of a small vineyard that produces something called Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and we saw their little bottling area and their little storage facility. I say little in relation to the other wine tasting I went to in Assisi, which was huge. This one was family owned, and right on their property that they own, but they are still was able to produce a lot of wine and even bottle/ label it on site. We tried three different kinds of reds. I thought this was cool, what they wrote on our itinerary about the Vido Nobile di Montepulciano. "According to DOCG rules, to be labeled as Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, a wine must come from vineyards on the hills which surround Montepulciano...the aging period for any Vino Nobile di Montepulciano is a minimum of 24 months of which at least 12 months must be spent in oak barrels. Local winemakers long used large Italian botti, rather than the smaller French barriques, as barriques would bring an undesirable level of toasty, vanilla oak flavors to the wine." Because wine tasting is no joke! They have this stuff down to a science! I don't really understand all the different flavor notes and things, but it's cool that some people can.

We then had to walk back up the large hill to get back to the bus (the valley was to small for a bus to drive down) and then drove into the main part of town for a few free minutes to take pictures and walk around the main part of the city. Oh funny story, they were counting us to make sure we had everyone, but they kept coming up short so they panicked and assumed they had left somebody at the vineyard. About 20 minutes of counting and recounting, and trying to reach this person but to no avail, they figure out they didn't even start the trip with us. They were counting an absent name the whole time... lol awkward. The wine made us sleepy so we took a nap on the bus :) and we were off to Pienza.

Pienza we finally got to do some stuff related to my architecture class. We went around to various churches and buildings that had comparable architecture to Florence because they were done by the same architect. The tour was pretty quick, I wish we would have had more time to learn about things, and also my teacher was talking really fast. But, there are some serious great views in this city because it is on a hill overlooking the large tuscan valley. So pretty! We also had a cheese tasting at a local store where we had some pecorino, which is the cheese Pienza is famous for. However, they never actually fed us lunch which was kind of annoying, and we didn't have time to go get lunch anywhere because all the extra free time we had was trying to find a bathroom or a gelateria. (side note, gelaterias are literally all over florence. Like CVS's there is one nearly every 30 feet. But apparently not here because I never got any gelato.) And that was pretty much all to be had there, and we went home.

A beautiful trip for sure, however it wasn't the most organized trip it seemed like, and so unfortunately that did affect the fun factor a little bit. Now that it is rainy today I definitely miss the sunshine we had there. I also miss not being sick, lol. But it is okay, because my awesome boyfriend comes in 3 days YAY and then my awesome aunt and uncle come in a short while after that, yay! I just have to survive this illness and do my homework by then :)

Ciao ciao!