Days 11 and 12

Italy 2011

Days 11 and 12

Day 11 There wasn’t a cloud in the sky when we awakened on our last morning in Lucca. We finished packing and walked one last time to our favorite place for caffe’. In a short time we were on the train headed for Florence. We were sad to leave Lucca, but once in Florence, we were excited to be there!

We checked into Hotel Centrale, where we stayed on our first trip in 2004, and Bob recognized the woman behind the desk.  Shari had no memory of her. Now if it had been a man…….

Our hotel is located in a quiet area close to the train station and only two blocks from the Duomo. This is such a magnificent structure! We are in awe every time we see it.

When we looked out our window, this is what we saw. It is Santa Lorenzo.

We had lunch at Cipolla Rossa (Red Onion) Osteria just down the block, and the food was unbelievably good. We had gnocchi in a spicy sauce with fresh pecorino (sheep cheese) and a huge salad with the freshest greens you can imagine and fresh buffalo cheese (a mozzarella cheese made from Water Buffalo milk - also note Shari's plate is wider than her!!).

We walked to the area where we stayed last year with Dan and Jan and found our favorite “haunts”. We had just gotten back to our hotel when a very big storm struck. It rained and hailed complete with thunder and lightening. Now this is was what it looked like outside our window.

We were planning to have dinner at our favorite pizza place across the river, but because it was still raining, we chose to eat at the same place we had lunch. I had a most delicious pasta dish with pork cheeks and goat cheese. Bob had pasta carbonara sauce and another amazingly fresh arugula salad with tomatoes.  If the pictures don’t show it, the portions are huge.

The rain stopped by the time we were finished eating, and it turned out to be a beautiful evening.

Day 12 We had an amazing adventure today, but first we will have to give you a little history. In 2004, on our first trip to Italy with Dan and Jan, we took a one-day guided bike tour into the Tuscan hills around Florence. Outside the small village of Fiesole, our bike group had lunch at a restaurant where only Italian was spoken. It seemed to be located in the middle of nowhere, but the food was so good that we never forgot it. Last year, when we met Dan and Jan in Florence, we set out to find that restaurant. Well, even though we didn’t forget the food, all four of us forgot where it was located! We took a bus to Fiesole and thought we could just walk to it, even though we didn’t even have the name of the restaurant. If you read our 2010 blog, you might remember that we walked and walked but never found it. So this year we were determined to find it, and we did our “homework”. Before leaving on the trip, we found the name of the restaurant….and even found a website. We wrote to them, and in Italian we were able to determine the days it is closed. We were planning to take a cab, but the owner of our hotel said that would be very expensive. She called the restaurant and found how to get there by bus. We took an open-top tour bus to Fiesole, and from there we took a small local bus. No one spoke English, but the few locals on the bus tried to be helpful. However, they ended up getting off before we did. When we finally showed the driver the name of the restaurant, he told us we missed the stop. The locals all talked at once (in Italian) trying to figure out what we should do. We ended up getting dropped off at a very small gravel/dirt road and told to follow it until we got to the main road and our restaurant. This is a picture of where we got dropped off and the road we were to follow.

We walked and walked until we saw a car driven by a farmer and showed him the name of the restaurant. Of course, he spoke only Italian, but we were able to understand that we had missed a turn. This is a picture of the turn we missed:

We took off up the steep hill through the trees, and eventually we made it back to the main road near the restaurant.

A little ways down this road we finally came to our beloved ristorante.

From the plain front, it would be difficult to tell the quality of the food, but that’s how most of the best places are where locals frequent. Once inside, no English was spoken. It was open for only two hours, and many locals arrived for their midday meal and wine.

Everything other people ordered looked so delicious that we wanted to taste all of it. Bob ordered Fettunta con Pomodoro, which is bread with garlic, olive oil, and chopped tomatoes. Shari had Crostini, which turned out to be bread slices with savory pate’s. which was ordered after seeing all the locals ordering it. It was so indescribably delicious. For our next course, Bob ordered tortellini with prosciutto filling topped with ragu sauce. Shari ordered penne with saffron, chopped eggplant, and ground sausage. This picture doesn’t do our food justice:

And that was our last course because we couldn’t eat any more food. However, for the third course we could have had raw beef, pigeon, lamb, etc. We did each end with an espresso so we could stay awake.

We went outside to wait for the bus that would take us to the village where we could catch our open-top bus, but after waiting 45 minutes, a woman worker from the restaurant, who lives in Florence, came out and offered to give us a ride directly to Florence. She spoke only Italian, but Bob was able to communicate a little with her, and she liked him because she is Croatian, too. She sped down the hill weaving around slow cars.

We ended our evening with salads at our new favorite restaurant, Cipolla Rossa, just down the block, because we were too full from lunch to go to the planned restaurant. Afterwards, we went for a walk because it was such a warm and calm evening. We walked into a beautiful church called Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore and for a short time listened to singers practicing.