And Now For Something Completely Different...

Welcome to the amazing, gorgeous world of Villa Murgiano, our own private little paradise just outside of Florence, Italy for a full week in May!  Three and a half months into my KL adventure, and it's time for a vacation!  This one, in fact, was planned a year ago - a week at a villa in Tuscany with the fam.

I started with a few days at home, before heading to Italy.  On my way out, I flushed away all my hopes and dreams at the KL airport bathroom, as instructed.

My 3-leg trip home was through Amsterdam and then Atlanta.  The moving walkway in Atlanta provided some nice calming faux-flora and chirping fauna - quite relaxing, when rushing to find one's gate.

The 5 days at home flew by in a muddle of crazy jetlag and massive allergies, though I made time to have my favorite dessert in the hood - shaved ice with ice cream, fruit, sweet red beans, and bits of rice mochi.  Despite having tried a few shaved ice places here in KL, none quite compare.

Orny and I had our first 2 (of a total of 3) flight legs together going from Pittsburgh to Florence.  Our pre-departure meal included one of my favorites - a veggie burger with bacon.  Bacon never tasted so damn good!  (it takes effort to get it in KL, and it's still not quite the same)

Dad picked me up at the Florence airport and we made our way on 8 kilometers of tiny, insanely narrow and windy roads, often bordered by stone walls with wild red poppies growing in them.   Our home-away-from-home - Villa Murgiano, lived up to its listing.  Unfortunately, as we purposely came before the official season started (cheaper, less crowded, and less hot), it was too cool to use the pool.  But the views were truly spectacular.  And, despite Orny kvetching that it was too cold and gloomy, it was perfect Inna weather - a slight chill in the air, but mostly still good with short sleeves, with a fresh breeze.

We had roughly 4 or 5 different outdoor sitting areas, each with a slightly different view of the olive groves and grape arbors (are they called arbors?)

We spent most of our indoor time here on the ground floor kitchen / dining / living area - with the cool arch.  Don't be fooled, however - there was a whole other kitchen on the 1st floor, plus another dining/living area, aside from the 5 bedrooms and 5 bathrooms, plus the perfect sulky-teenager area with a little loft up in the tower.

Depending on the weather, which was mostly delightful - 60s-70s, partly sunny, with big fluffy clouds - the distant ridges appeared in differing shades.  

Although it was pretty cool, it was still very buggy, and I got bitten up good.  Oh well.

One of my favorite places to sit - shade and sun, lovely breezes, amazing views.  What more could one need?!

Ah yes - food!  With two great chefs among us (dad and Troy), we ate like royalty right in our own (it was ours for a week!) glorious Tuscan villa.  Simple, fresh, and delicious!  Veggie salad with olive oil grown on the premises, chick peas with roasted tomato parmesan spread, and meatballs.

Pasta with light ragu of veggies, parmesan, and ricotta.  And, of course, wine made from grapes grown on the property!

The villa was full of lots of assorted books, including an Italian to Russian phrase dictionary which caused much merriment by its silly selection of phrases and frequent mistranslations.

It really doesn't take much to have an amazingly delicious breakfast - grilled bread, butter, locally crafted meats and cheeses - and voila!

While we're on the topic of food, I had the BEST octopus I'd even imagined at a restaurant (Il Vezzo) in Florence, a great find by my sister, our unofficial tour director.  Not in the least chewy but tender and crispy on the outside and simply unbelievably delicious.  (I mean the octopus... not my sister!)

The Duomo in Florence is one of my favorite buildings - I just love the two-tone marble they used.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was scoring an amazing seat at one of the many cafes in the area, with the most perfect view ever.  Some amazing cappuccino and tiramisu, relaxing and appreciating the gorgeous building, a bit of people watching as the line to get into the Duomo snaked around 2-3 sides of the building, watching the street artists hawk their wares...  Only wish I had more time to just sit and enjoy it before the rain moved in.

We went to the Opera del Duomo Museum, which actually had nothing to do with opera, but rather stands for the plural of "opus", meaning all the original religious works from the Duomo are housed there, and the Duomo itself has replicas in it.  As I'm finding more and more that I'm drawn more to enjoying the architecture and feel of a place rather than to museums (such a philistine, perhaps), I was mostly drawn here to the Gregorian chant room, which not only had some nice chants playing (so haunting), but those were just a modern backdrop to the original beautifully calligraphed books on display.

I got to wear Dad's hat - we both have such big heads, it's rare for me to find a hat that fits me.  I'm quite fond of temporarily stealing his when we travel together. :) 

We went to the Palazzo Vecchio, which was lovely - but still no comparison to the view out one of its windows...

We decided to punt on going into the Duomo itself, as the line was just never-ending;  but we did make it into the baptistry, which is a smaller but still quite lovely and very ornate building.  Unfortunately they weren't letting people up into the balcony, which had some super beautiful motifs made with the two-toned marble, different in each section.

Dad, sis and her BF in one of the lovely narrow side streets of Florence.

Mom enjoying the view outside while sitting in our villa's living room.

And... what's not to enjoy!!!!!  Wow, I miss it already!

View from a scenic overlook of the city.

A close-up of the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno river, which now, sadly, is all generic jewelry shops.

One of my favorite street signs, which Orny christened the "oh shit!"

At the Uffizi Gallery, I stepped out to the rooftop cafe to have another cappuccino (my guilty pleasure of Italy), and was amused to people-watch this woman, a Russian tourist, whose face had the perfect features similar to those in the paintings on the walls below.

View of the Duomo through the ornate railing outside the rooftop cafe.

Making full use of our Firenze cards, we visited the Boboli gardens, which were lovely but extremely steep, with lots of paths, stairs, and a huge stepped lawn.  They also had two massive stone bathtubs... 

.... and some neat statuary and hedge landscaping.

It was a delight, after being surrounded by so many mechanical building cranes in KL, to see a live one  - here perched on Neptune's head!  Though we were debating whether this was a cormorant, crane, or  

View down from the top.  You can see in the distance this interesting tree that looks like an open umbrella, though it's still a kind of pine, apparently.  Troy joked that they have "Umbrella Pines" - both closed (Cypresses) when it's sunny and open in the rain.

It was easy to imagine folk from eras gone by strolling through the lovely garden paths.

View back on the Duomo from the Boboli gardens.  Also, the day I realized that wearing new shoes, even if comfy initially, isn't the smartest thing when walking over 5 miles that day...

On Friday we drove the roughly 1-1.5 hours on "big" roads to the lovely small hill town of Siena.  I've always wanted to go there and had previously not had the opportunity.  As expected, I loved the narrow mostly-pedestrian streets (for some reason they had some vintage-car thing going on, which seemed kind of annoying on such narrow little streets with no sidewalks).  This is a view of the main plaza from one of the side streets.

Little stone streets and old buildings of Siena

Siena also has a lovely Duomo, which uses a similar striped motif as the one in Florence.  Here, we did go in.

I was so taken with the stripes of different colors of marble!

Amazing inlaid marble floors with various designs - castles, knights, religious motifs.

We bought as part of our admission a ticket a climb to the roof.  The steps were tiny, narrow, and revolved around a central stone pillar - equally dizzy-making going up as down.  In places like this I always imagine what it must have been like over the centuries of people climbing up there, torches ablaze...

The wait and climb were so worth the unbelievable view!  The weather cooperated and provided amazing puffy clouds that lay like atop an invisible air roof, providing an amazing counterpart to the red slate roofs of the city.

The narrow steps lead to a tiny balcony-like walkway around 3 sides of one section of the Duomo, which was really only wide enough for one person, but folks from the front of the line had to squeeze past those of us at the back of the line to go out, as there was only one entrance.  But man, the views, the air up there....!

I really would have loved to stay up there much longer, but they had groups scheduled every half hour, alas.

We then stopped in to grab a quick lunch, where Papa battled an epic gelato...

... and admirably and valiantly vanquished it!

Back at the villa, Orny enjoying the view.

A few additional things that didn't seem to fit the pictures directly:

- I think I've mentioned before that the way I initially was able to find my way around the Petronas Towers in KL, where I work, was to look for the hallway opening between the Ferragamo and Gucci stores.  It thus amused me quite a bit that in Florence they had both a Ferragamo and a Gucci museum!  (We went to neither)

 - There was also, to my consternation, a store called "Jaconda Outlet"

- I alternated days of going out exploring and staying in to enjoy the scenery from all our porches, read, nap, and just hang out.  That seemed like a delightful pace for me, great balance between touristy stuff and restful stuff.

- As Florence is at the same latitude as Portland, ME and it was relatively close to the Summer Solstice, the days were especially long, with light from around 5am to almost 9pm.  As I've been living more or less on the equator for around 4 months by then with relatively equal amounts of daylight and night-time, this especially struck me.

- Though I wasn't the one driving, I nonetheless found the tiny super-narrow roads to be anxiety-provoking, to say the least.  But, by the third day, only the tiniest of single lane two-way streets elicited an intense adrenaline response from my passenger self.

- We played Bang! on one of the evenings after another simple but yummy homemade supper (i eschewed the pasta and beef, but had fresh mozzarella with fried peppers and mushrooms and yummy special honey mustard).  Mom was the sheriff and I was the renegade, and in the end she bested me.

- Since I'm so kitty-deprived in KL, I was delighted to meet the cute little black & white kitty on our patio on our penultimate day, and to feed her a bit of milk and have a nice conversation.

- On Friday night, Sis and Dad had a surprise - they hired a chef to cook us an authentic Tuscan dinner at our villa! Our cook was Jess, who made for us: grilled and then fried eggplant with minted ricotta, pesto gnocchi with green beans, chicken w red peppers and almonds with lightly fried zucchini, and a ricotta and cream pudding with strawberries with reduced balsamic vinegar and a sugar-nut brittle.  Yum.

- We also got to meet Katya, the house owner, and had breakfast with her on Saturday morning before taking off for the airport.  From her, learned about her farm - in the old days they grew 4 crops all in small spaces alternating mulberries for silk worms, olive trees, grapes, and wheat, for when families needed to change the size of their plots based on how many sons there were to work the land.

- I flew for half of Saturday and half of Sunday, and got  back to KL late afternoon on my birthday.

It was no fun spending most of my birthday day on long tedious flights back to KL.  But my serviced apartment residence surprised me with a birthday treat in the evening!