Toscana

Last weekend my program took our group on a 3 day weekend to the Tuscan region of Italy. We left at the un-heard of hour of 7:30 AM on Friday morning and made our way to Pienza, which is a little further south of Siena and a three hour drive from Ferrara. The town was one of those classic Tuscan villages that centers around their duomo and has spectacular views of the rolling Tuscan hills and olive trees. A cool thing about this particular city was that we could see the house that Russell Crowe "lived" in when he played in the movie The Gladiator, which is one of my favorites. We also did a wine tasting in Montecino which was very cool.
We stayed in what was called an agroturismo, which is tiny houses all connected in the middle of the Tuscan hills, nowhere close to any city we may have heard of.
On Saturday, we went to Siena where two of my best Wofford friends are studying ad I got to see them!! They even came on one of our tours with us and afterwards I got to meet some of their friends as well. Siena was beautiful and I really enjoyed learning about the Palio, which is their annual horse race, the one Wofford tries to copy with our "Terrio".
Sunday, we visited Monterriggioni, which is a town/village so small that I could see the other side of the city and reach the opposite wall in about 2 minutes, walking. It was very quaint and cute and had some wonderful views. We also visited Pistoia and I enjoyed seeing the duomo in that city, because it had some beautiful art.
We returned in the evening and totally crashed. My host father saw me come in the door and said, "Che destruta!!" Translation: She is destroyed...hahaha
The pictures are of the huge barrells of wine (16,000 bottles worth in each) and me with some of the girls in front of the view from our agroturismo.