We spent nearly two weeks in rural Tuscany, based near San Gimignano for the first week and between Cortona and Arezzo for the second. Great locations and AirBNBs and great food … unfortunately terrible weather. You may have heard about the terrible floods that hit around Imola and the east of Italy. Fortunately we missed the floods, but were 200km to the west of where that was happening and it rained almost every day with about 4 days that it rained all day.

So if you see blue skies in any of the below photos, be suspicious - photoshop may have been involved!

We visited a number of hill towns and generally preferred the smaller more intimate (less touristy) ones like Pienza, Volterra, Cortona and Monepulciano over the big names like Siena and Arezzo.

There is a similar pattern to all of these towns, just on a different scale:

Park outside the walls and enter via a medieval gate (woe betide you if you drive in - fines of Eu150+ apply for entering a ZTL without the right paperwork).
Walk narrow cobbled streets with more or less tourists (and tourist shops and cafes) depending on how famous the town is. Leather shops everywhere.
Visit a number of piazzas with a Town Hall, “Duomo”, and numerous other churches. The size and extent of decoration varies depending on the size of the town (and the wealth of its benefactors - many were obviously quite wealthy!).
Visit museum.

Some of them also have Roman ruins or quirky other sites to visit - Thérèse’s quirky historian brain loves the museum of torture in San Gimignano which although a commercial rather than government museum, does a quality job to present some of the “delights” of our past (with a particular focus on the inquisition and medieval witch torture!) and present (including Middle East and US death penalty).

But a major part of the holiday is simply the drive from town to town and stopping at the restaurants on the way. We found 3 or 4 high quality restaurants, varying between local trattorias and 6 course degustation lunches on our drives well away from the tourist hotspots.

Under a Tuscan ........ Cloud