Italian Culinary Adventure ~ 2003

by Deborah Mele

Our trip back to Italy this year started out as a simple vacation back to the land we both enjoy so much to explore. We then decided to schedule it over our 30th wedding anniversary, and invited our two grown children, their spouses and our 6 week old granddaughter to join us for a week to help us celebrate this milestone. Finally, my husband found out he had a business meeting in Beaune, France the beginning of June, so we booked our Italian vacation right before the scheduled meeting so we could accomplish everything in one trip. Since there would be 6 adults and one infant traveling on this trip, I looked into renting a farmhouse for a week in a central location which worked out to be much cheaper than three hotel rooms for 7 nights, and gave us a home base to come back to and relax every day after exploring on our daily trips.

I chose a farmhouse located just southwest of Siena near a small town called Asciano, called Villa le Focaie. This was a great location, allowing us to take day trips to Florence, Siena, Montalcino, Umbria, San Gimignano, and the Chianti towns. Renting a villa or a farmhouse is a great idea if you are traveling with a group, or if you are interested in exploring a fairly centralized area, such as Tuscany. If you wanted to visit the major Italian cities such as Venice, Rome, Florence, and Naples, then of course renting a specific place for an entire week just wouldn't be practical. Also, renting a villa or farmhouse often works out to be cheaper, particularly if you compare the cost of 7 nights stay in hotels in the major cities. Another advantage to having a home base such as this is that you can prepare meals for yourself, and we usually had breakfast and then dinner at home after enjoying our largest meal at lunch while on the road exploring each day. This was our second time renting a place for a week, and we enjoyed both, although having the family with us this trip made the experience even more enjoyable. Click on photo for larger view!

We ended up spending 11 days in Italy, 7 in Tuscany at the farmhouse with our family, and then my husband and I flew down to Taormina, Sicily for 4 days before heading up to France for my husband's business meeting. Overall, we had a wonderful time once again, but the one thing that this trip reminded me was that traveling in Europe can be a challenge. If you are a very orderly person who has to have everything organized and on schedule, and if you don't like surprises, then you might find travel in Europe very frustrating. We found it necessary to have lots of patience this trip, and to accept each new surprise or change in plans as a challenge, rather than become completely frustrated by everything that happened.

I had arranged three separate flights from different cities for us all to arrive in Rome within an hour of each other. Knowing that generally at least one out of every three flights arrives late, I was pleasantly surprised to find we all arrived as scheduled. We had rented a 9 passenger van to carry all 7 of us plus our luggage, and it should have been ready for us at 10am. We were finally handed the keys at 12:30pm however as we were told it was being "cleaned". What exactly they cleaned I have no idea, because it was pretty dirty inside when it was handed over to us. We were all so tired after our long flights however that we didn't complain, and were just happy to be on the road. When we filled it with gas the second time after a few days of travel, my husband decided to check the tires for air since we were doing a lot of driving, and he was very dismayed to find the front tires very worn, even bald in spots. If we had been closer to Rome, we would have returned the van for another one, but instead we kept it although we drove carefully, and checked the tires often. Luckily, we returned it without anything negative happening despite the number of miles we put on it that week.

Our second challenge came when one of our suitcases went missing on our flight from Rome to Taormina. We reported it lost at the airport, and were in fact told 6 hours later that it had been found, but it was almost 24 hours before it arrived at our hotel. No one seemed to know why it took so long, or where it was for almost a day before it was returned to us. The next surprise came upon our arrival in Paris after a long day of travel from Taormina to Rome, and then on to Paris. We asked at the airport if a taxi or train would be better to travel into the city center, and were informed that the trains had been having rotating strikes for a day or two, so that traffic was terrible since many people had been avoiding train travel. Because of the chaos the strikes were causing however, train travel that day was free, so rather than fight traffic into the city in a taxi that would cost a minimum of 50 euros, we took the train, lugging our three suitcases on with us.

We arrived in the city only to find Paris extremely hot, very crowded, and much dirtier than I had remembered. We ended up waiting over an hour in line for a taxi to our hotel from the train station, and once we finally arrived I was not impressed to find our hotel did not have air conditioning, despite the fact I was told specifically that it did before booking it. After a sweltering night, we arose early to catch our train to Beaune, an almost three hour trip from Paris. I had tried to be very organized, and had booked our train tickets online at home before arriving, and we had picked them up at the train station in the airport upon arrival. Arriving at the train station that morning however, we found all the trains to Beaune had been cancelled that day, and the only train that would even get us close would take us to Dijon, but we couldn't get to Beaune until the following day from there. Since my husband had to be at a meeting that afternoon, that wasn't an option, so we ran over to the car rental agencies in the station, and tried to rent a car to drive to Beaune.

Apparently we were not the only ones who had this idea, because the first 4 agencies were out of cars, and finally my husband begged the 5th one for anything they had available, and they offered us this tiny little car that we could barely fit both ourselves and our luggage into which had no air conditioning. Having no other choice we took it, and drove to Beaune with the windows open. Our problems, (or challenges) were not over however, as we arrived in Beaune in temperatures in the high 90's F. only to find out that our hotel's air conditioning unit was broken. The hotel did offer to give us all the free mineral water we could drink each day until it was fixed, but with temperatures soaring, this was little consolation at the time. Apparently the weather had been cool until that week, so the hotel, one of the city's best, did not know it even had a problem until it tried turning on the unit for the first time this year. We spent our time in Beaune in our very warm hotel room, drinking lots of water and trying to stay cool, finally getting air conditioning on our last night.

You would probably think that nothing else could possibly go wrong on this trip, but if you did, unfortunately you would be wrong. We drove our rental car back to Paris, and checked into the airport hotel I had booked for our last night since we had a very early flight to Milan, connecting to Toronto scheduled for the following morning. As we were checking in, the hotel clerk asked what our plans were. When we told him our flight schedule, he informed us that the air traffic controllers apparently were now on strike, and that most European flights were being cancelled. My husband called Alitalia, and indeed our flight had been cancelled. After some effort however, we were squeezed onto an Air France flight the next day which flew direct to Toronto. When we finally arrived back home, with all of our luggage, we could actually look back and laugh, but I have to admit, the many snags we had experienced this trip were at times frustrating. I am telling you about all of these small problems not to discourage you from traveling to Europe, but simply to express that travel abroad often seems to come with it's unique challenges, and as long as you expect them, you can still enjoy your trip despite them.

Thankfully, our time in Tuscany with the family was uneventful, and we had a wonderful time exploring Tuscan cuisine and locations, with a single day trip into Umbria. I have kept a journal of our culinary adventures in Italy that I will share, adding each day online as soon as I have them completed. As well, I have many photographs of our trip that accompany my journal that I will have online as well. Feel free to use any of these photos, as long as I am given credit for them. I hope you enjoy my latest Italian culinary journey, and find my notes helpful when planning your next trip to Italy. Perhaps some of the delicious dishes described will inspire you as they do me to spend more time in the kitchen! To begin reading my latest culinary journal click on the links below!

Day One ~ Villa le Focaie

Day Two~ Siena

Day Three ~ Montalcino

Day Four ~ Florence

Day Five ~ Umbria

Day Six ~ San Gimignano

Day Seven ~ Chianti Towns

Days Eight & Nine ~ Taormina, Sicily

Days Ten & Eleven ~ Taormina, Sicily

To see the latest photo gallery from this trip, click HERE!

Buon Appetito!
Deborah Mele 2003
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