Next, I went on a wine tasting tour of Chianti this weekend! We first headed to the walled city of San Gimignano. It lies about 35 miles from both Florence and Siena and is a fascinating place to see.
It is famous for it's imposing medieval towers:
San Gimignano creates an impressive skyline with it's many towers clustered together at the top of a large hill. It was founded in the 300's by the Etruscans, a pre-Roman society with their own unique language and religion. However the city reached it's peak during the medieval period (sorry guys, that's about as specific as any history information from the web could get) as an important trading post on the route from Northern Italy to Rome. In the 14th century, weathy family began building these towers to show off said wealth. There were once 72 towers in total, but only 14 remain today. The city extends beyond the walls now, but the walls are still standing and in decent shape, which is not the case for many formerly-walled cities here. This demarcation is important, because walking through the maingate into town is like stepping back a millenium in time. The buildings seem completely unchanged. They're pretty crowded, too - my guess is that they filled the walls up a long time ago and there just wasn't room for anything new. It is really amazing. Because of the town's unique architechtural heritage, it has been designated a World Heritage site but UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.)
Now, I'm a huge architecture buff, so I spent all my time gawking at the ancient stonework, but supposedly the city is also very famous for it's view. So when Lexie saw a sign that looked like it might say "scenic view that way" in Italian, she shooed me up a hill to the edge of the city wall. At first I wasn't so convinced about this view, becuase we had a pea-soup fog surrounding us:
But (luckily!) that slowly sank away right before we had to get back on the bus:
WOW!! It looks like a storybook. This is probably where those people that illustrate storybooks get those images of castles on a hill in the mist with patch quilt feilds. These pictures don't even do justice to how beautiful it was. So once Lexie got me up the scenic route, she had to drag me kicking and screaming away from it, back to our super-fancy Mercedes Benz bus:
That's right, NYU kids ride in style to wine tastings in Chianti. I heart NYU. And a brief thank you to the CRA's and other NYU employees with acronyms I don't know for putting this trip together. This is Stephani, our CRA (right) and Lexie, my PA (left.)
Chianti was equally as beautiful:
Chianti isn't actually the name of a town, it's the name of a region. But it's a region with sub-regions, as well... so it gets very confusing. Basically, way back when Chianti wine became famous, so surrounding areas wanted to be able to put "Chianti" on their winebottles, so they've re-drawn some borders a few different times. I am under the impression that our particular winery (Castello di Verrazzano) is in the original Chianti area. The town we were in is actually Greve, or rather "Greve in Chianti" as all the towns in the Chianti area have added "in Chianti" to their names to show off.
Before our winetasting we got a little tour of the winery:
I'm afraid I didn't catch a lot of what he was saying because I was taking these pictures. But basically grapes become wine. And sometimes people get all uppity about just how that is done and pay a lot of money for it.
"Quiet! The wine is resting." Haha. Then came our various wines! They actually served a nice meal with it too, which I wasn't expecting.
And they even had dessert wine! It tastes like honey and you dip biscotti in it:
YUMMY. Now, I had decided that this was probably a once in a lifetime kinda thing for me, so I was going to pick whichever wine I liked the best and buy a bottle. And lo and behold, of all the wines I had, the one I liked best by far was the cheapest one!
5.80 euros, my friends. That is cheaper than $10 American. So I have cheap wine tastes. Personally, I'm happy about that. I also signed the guestbook and left a little memento:
Gill (the cartoon fish I draw for those of you who don't know) has now become a world traveller. In fact, he is all over Italy and will be in Athens in two weeks! Haha.
So we said our goodbyes and headed back to Florence. Now, I actually became carsick-ish driving up those hilly roads in our Mercedes Benz, so as soon as we got into Florence they let me off so I could walk home. This may be a little anti-climatic, but I took some shots of Florence as we were walking back that I might as well include in here as well:
This is the Palazzo Vecchio, the government seat. The name means "Old Palace."
That's all for this trip!
Hope you enjoyed, Kate
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