Tuscany

We’re almost directly on top of Salt Lake City, with an hour and a half until landing. It’s our third time flying between London and LAX with Virgin. I’m feeling pretty tired after the five-hour nap I just woke up from, and not too optimistic about our jet lag once we land. Then again, it’s not like we haven’t gotten over some jet lag a few times already in the past few months.

The first outlines of where we’d be during the week between Greece and Kat’s wedding only appeared a few days before we landed in Florence. I was fairly excited about revisiting Italy, where we took our first international trip together in 2017, but Alice wasn’t hugely enthused about the idea, and it took a recommendation from Pushkar for Tuscany to get her over the edge.

The whole trip came together in record time: we decided we’d spent five nights at five different properties around Tuscany, and drive from one to the other (in a convertible of course) in a loop between Florence and Val d’Orcia. 

At the start of these nine months on the road, I was pretty against one-night hotel stays, but our unpacking and repacking has gotten so efficient that the pace of the trip felt relaxed and comfortable. We fell into a routine: wake up around nine for a cappuccino and a light breakfast; pack up and drive for an hour or so on country roads to our next destination listening to old Italian songs; settle in and get a quick workout done; have a wine tasting and explore the landscape around us as golden hour fell; have dinner either on property or tiny Tuscan villages with names like Volpaia and Montisi before drifting off to sleep around midnight, full and content. 

Secret garden

Our first stay was at Tenuta Guardastelle, a little winery a few minutes outside of San Gimignano. In the morning after we checked out, we discovered a little wraparound terrace on the main house of the agriturismo, which opened up to our first real look at the rolling hills of Tuscany. After this sabbatical, wine country, rather than the beach, seems likely to be our go-to for future relaxing vacations, between the near-guaranteed sunshine, beautiful scenery, and good vibes.

Borrowed scenery

Jesse brought us to his favorite temple in Kyoto, Entsu-ji, back in November. The trees in the temple’s garden frame the view of a distant Mt. Hiei, in what is known as a particularly pleasing example of shakkei, or borrowed scenery. All of the properties in Tuscany felt like they were attuned to this idea; the star of each was the Tuscan landscape, which would develop new and shifting textures, colors, and shapes each day as the golden hour set in. Borgo Pignano might have done it the best.

Paola's house

Pieve Aldina was where we had my favorite food day of the week. The cherry tomatoes we had for lunch were perfectly jammy and sweet; Alice thought they stood up to the ones she sampled without me at a farmer’s market in Rome all those years ago during our first visit to Italy, the ones that opened her eyes to what produce could be outside of America. That night, we drove to Volpaia for dinner at five-table trattoria called Bar Ucci. Paola, the owner, didn’t speak much English, but served us what we could only describe as the Platonic ideal of tomato sauce spaghetti, and lots of grazies and tutto benes.

Fresh produce

One of my favorite moments on this leg of the trip was the hour we had between the end of our wine tasting (where Alice was very pleased with herself after impressing our sommelier with her palate) and the start of dinner at Lupaia. The sunlight coated everything in a soft golden glow, and we just walked around the property taking in the scenery. Alice is pictured here stealing a bite of cabbage straight from the garden.

Romanticism

Jack talks about his capital-R Romantic ideals sometimes. I think of myself as distinctly less of a Romantic than him, but I knew when starting this sabbatical that the rugged landscapes of Patagonia were the one destination that I did feel a certain pull towards. I realized at some point as we were figuring out where we’d go for this week-long interregnum that driving around Tuscany as golden hour set in was another. We had originally planned to spend our last afternoon in the countryside making our way around the Val d’Orcia, in what I’d expected to be the highlight of our trip for me. It ended up raining that day, but our walk around Lupaia the evening before in the hazy glow of the sunset and Brunello more than made up for it.

Archnemeses

Follonico was our last stop, a little agriturismo that might have been the Platonic ideal of agriturismos. Guests usually have to stay for a minimum of three nights (Alice managed to get us an exception), gathering for communal breakfasts and dinners homecooked by Fabio and Suzanne who own the place. The thing I’ll remember most about Follonico was how full of life it felt. I’ve never heard flowers until the bushes here, teeming with pollinators of all sorts going about their business; singing birds were criss-crossing overhead while the two family dogs lounged from one spot to another sunbathing. Right when we arrived, we were greeted by a family of geese; a few minutes after this photo, Alice suffered her first mortal wound of our sabbatical, cemented her fear of birds, and learned that a mother goose can be surprisingly aggressive and fast. 

The last sunset

It was cloudy when we arrived in Florence at around four in the afternoon on our last day. We spent the next couple of hours speed-running the Duomo, Piazza Michelangelo, and a dinner of Florentine steak under a thick gray sky. But on the way home, we saw a crowd of people gathered on a bridge; I checked the time and saw that it was three minutes before sunset. As we emerged from the dense maze of Florence’s old town onto the Ponte Santa Trinita, a spectacularly vivid display of orange and purple opened up in front of us, just about a perfect surprise for our last sunset of the sabbatical (we’ll be seeing the midnight sun in Iceland), and for our two-year anniversary.