Today we decided to take a touristy trip into the Tuscan countryside. In general, I hate being one of the sheeple in a tour group, but I always forget how much I like a good tour guide. Ours was Agatha, a Polish postdoctoral student who studied Renaissance art in England in the winter and lived in Florence in the summer. She spoke English well, and was also rather funny. 

Overall, I liked our tour, but I’m going to try to refrain from making this sound like an ad, so I won’t mention the company. If you’re going to Florence and want to look them up, let us know. 

We started our day in Siena, where we learned about a crazy horse race that happens twice a year in the village square in the name of the Virgin Mary. Siena has 17 districts (in a town of 55,000, they are not huge districts) and each district is randomly assigned a horse. They party for three days and then the jockeys get on bareback and do three laps around a hilly semicircle with sharp corners. The jockeys often fall off, but the horse who crosses the finish line first wins regardless of its rider’s status, which seems fair to me. Then, there is more celebration. Otherwise, it is a very cute town with very narrow streets. It was founded about 1000 years ago by bankers, who built a lot of religious stuff to redeem themselves for being bankers, and then town construction essentially halted 300 years later. Today, it’s all protected as a UNESCO world heritage site, so no touching. 

Siena (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Inside the dome of the Siena Cathedral (Photo/Jason Rafal)

After Siena, we drove out to an organic farm in the Chianti region for lunch. Let me say this about the Tuscan wine country: if Florence is absurdly beautiful, Tuscany is basically inconceivable. I have no words. It’s somewhere between the original definitions of sublime and beautiful; it has the awe-inspiring quality of the sublime, but none of the terror, and much of the softness of the beautiful. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you can look up Edmund Burke. I don’t recommend reading the entire book, but the ideas are interesting. 

Tuscany, with San Gimignano on the hill in the background (Photo/Jason Rafal)

(Photo/Jason Rafal)

With lunch, we had four types of wine: a white, a young Chianti, a merlot, and a dessert wine. I wouldn’t say that I can pair food and wine now, but I’m starting to get it. Also wine is delicious. 

After lunch, we went up the hill to San Gimignano. As Agatha put it, this is a perfectly preserved medieval town because nothing of interest has happened here in 600 years. In San Gimignano, we had the best gelato in the world (according to a panel of experts) and took more pictures of Tuscany being gorgeous. And then we all got back on the bus and took a nice wine-induced nap. 

The best gelato (Photo/Jason Rafal)

Lastly, we went to the leaning tower of Pisa, where we refused to take pictures of ourselves holding the tower up. I did make us take a selfie, which hurt Jason’s artistic pride a great deal. The tower has been stabilized, so some people climbed it. We wandered around instead. 

The leaning tower of Pisa (Photo/Jason Rafal)

If you come to Florence and have more than a day to explore, get out into the countryside. And then call me so that we can discuss Burke.