Sunday: Final Week – back in Italy

One of the tragic things that we’ve taken to doing on holiday is telling each other what song we’re singing to ourselves. The objective is either to relate the song to whatever it was that made you start singing it (to yourself – with my musical ability, silence is golden). For example, when the sun goes behind a cloud, “the sun has got its hat on” usually springs to mind. Often the songs are the worst songs ever created and today for a reason that I will never understand, I got the theme song to The Brady Bunch in my head. Four days later, and it is still proving hard to shift.

Anyway, we got away from Ancona fairly early to drive back to Tuscany to Citta Della Pieve, where we are staying for two nights. It was great being back on Italian roads, with Italian drivers – everything just happens without any great drama, they pass in sensible places, always move out of the outside lane and generally just make life easy on the roads.

The drive itself was really good. Having spent 10 days in Croatia, where Rovinj was fantastic, and the Makarska Riviera was beautiful, but the bits in between weren’t quite up to spec, the Italian country side with all the colours of its olives trees, grape vines, sun flowers, hay bales, hill top towns and church spires really is a site to behold. Most of the drive was on small back country roads, so we were able to just cruise along at a nice pace with the roof down and the wind in our hair.

For lunch, we went back to Montepulciano, as we had really liked that on our first visit. The walk up to the top of the town past all the shops develops a good appetite in the 30 something degree heat of the day. After lunch and some shopping, we headed to Citta Della Pieve, where we had booked in for two nights before heading to Rome – the final destination in our holiday.

When we booked the hotel, we thought that it was in Perugia (because we looked up Perugia to find it), but once we’d booked it, we found out that it was in the region of Perugia, not the city of Perugia, so was in fact only about 20 minutes away from the villa we’d stayed in Tuscany 4 weeks earlier. This turned out to be a most fortuitous mistake because Perugia was a fairly large city, whereas Citta Della Pieve turned out to be a charming little town – very Italian (they don’t speak much English in the shops or cafes, which was really nice). We arrived in the late afternoon and after checking into the Hotel Vanussi, where we are booked for two nights, we went for a walk around the town. Being Sunday evening, lots of people were out in the square enjoying a wine or a gelato, so we sat down for a beer and wine ourselves. It was great seeing all the families out walking together in the evening. It reminded us very much of Carmona, a small town we stayed in just out of Seville in Spain.

The hotel has two restaurants – a pizza restaurant and a formal restaurant. The pizza restaurant was doing a great trade with the locals, so we had dinner there, with a bottle of the Vino Nobile de Montepulciano (the noble wine of Montepulciano).