Around Villa Bordoni

i like these doors. i like a lot of stuff about this place...

















Mental note, get huge rosemary plants on my future property













This town, which bears Gail, Pierro, Matty and Mikey's last name, is right outside florence, i guess its like a suburb.

Where we've been for the past few days

This is Villa Bordoni. Its in Greve in Chianti, which is, believe it or not, in Chianti (the Chianti Classico region specifically). If you didnt know, the whole of Chianti takes up much of Tuscany, but Chianti Classico is the area just south of Florence and north of Siena. Its a really nice place. More pics coming in a minute












this is our room.















this is some cypress trees on the property
















This is a house across the way... sick view right?









btw u can click the pics for a bigger version
-Ilya
ps uge u suck

We Miss You Gizmo!

This trip has been great but i wish gizmo was here with us........Cant wait to see him in a week! -Ilya

The Deal (Synopsis of Tues thru Thurs)

So, we've been in Italy for 3 days now and I'm finally getting a chance to update the blog. We arrived in Rome on Tuesday. Upon our arrival we wandered through the Rome airport until we finally found the car rental area. We picked up our horrible little Smart car and headed north to a small town called Tolfa which is about 30 miles north of the city. We arrived at Fontana del Papa which is a really cool agriturismo spot. The b&b is a restored farmhouse on acres of gorgeous land. The hosts were very kind, the house was really cool and rustic and the food was delicious. We met two nice couples during lunch and dinner - one from Lousiana and another from Florida. We also visited the town of Tolfa which is quaint but active in the evening. The locals seemed pretty curious about who we were but it was cool. Our Florida friends recommended a villa in Chianti so we headed north on Wednesday morning. We left Tolfa around 12:30pm and expected to arrive at Villa Bordoni around 3/4pm. Villa Bordoni is located in a town in the Chianti region called Greve. If you take the autostrada it should take a few hours from Tolfa but our gps wasn't working and we were instructed to take the scenic route through the countryside. We drove for hours taking wrong turn after wrong turn. It started to get dark and we had no idea where we were. Plus, asking for directions is not the easiest thing to do when one person speaks absolutely no Italian and the other barely knows conversational Italian. Thank God for hand gestures and Ilya's ability to remember basic phrases from when he studied in Florence 10yrs ago. We finally met a nice, old Italian man in a Tabacco shop who drew a mini map and directed us to Greve. It was approximately 7:30pm when we finally arrived in Greve. We drove through a nice town center and up what seemed to be a never ending dirt rode surrounded by olive groves. We could barely see a thing but we finally reached Villa Bordoni at the top of a steep hill. The villa was absolutely beautiful. Our room was perfect...even a giant size shower which is not easy to find in Italy. We decided to spend 5 nights here. It's perfectly appointed but it's also very close to Florence and a lot of the other little towns we want to check out. We haven't been able to kick the jet lag. We didn't wake up until 11am on Thursday. We missed breakfast so we headed down the hill to the Greve town center where we had lunch at a great little Enoteca. What a wonderful meal! We had a cauliflower souflle and a meat/cheese antipasti. I had a tasty meat ragu and Ilya had tortolle (a bigger version of tortellini) stuffed with potato and tomato. We had a very informative, English speaking waiter who made the experience even more pleasurable. After lunch we headed to Florence to see if we could trade our Smart car for a normal size car but we were fresh out of luck. Oh well...we'll be driving the hunk of junk till it breaks down somewhere on a windy road. After we finally got away from the Florence traffic we went to "The Mall". The Mall is an outlet center with stores like Gucci, Burberry, blah blah blah. It's a great place packed with Asian people (if you know me you know how much I love my Asian friends). After we purchased a few souvenirs we jumped back in the Mr. Bean car and headed back to Greve. We had a great dinner in Greve...ordered way too much food as usual. We had polenta squares with mushrooms, another meat/cheese antipasti and two pizzas (truffle/porcini & napoli (pizza with anchoives). Another delicious meal and a lot less room for us to breathe. We're planning on spending tomorrow in Florence. We're going to try to get some sleep and wake up at a normal hour. NICOLE

young jeezy- vacation

I love this song and it seems à propos for the trip...
-ilya

Nicole's First Post

For those of you who know us, we have not laid down any roots. We have been bouncing around the NY tri-state area since we met. Bergen County, NJ will always be home to me and Ilya is a definite Nyer but we've been searching for a place to start planting our roots for a few years. We couldn't stand the hell of commuting and working in Manhattan so we have been in the Hamptons for the past few months. Our Italy trip is an itinerary free journey through Northern Italy. Although it's only a 2 week trip we hope to do a lot of exploring and meet some cool Italians...and shop of course. I wish we started this blog earlier because we've been on some pretty interesting trips with a main focus on local cuisine. Well, it's never too late to start.

NICOLE

First Post

This is going to be Nicole and Ilya's blog to keep everyone who cares updated on our travels and adventures. We are both going to be posting (hopefully). Expect my posts to be crude and rife with spelling and grammatical errors. Expect nicole's to be overly nice and boring. :)

-Ilya

ps yes i know my "first" post was actually my second. I dont know how to figure this prog out. so sue me

Nicole and Ilya Eat Northern Italy

The old ball and chain and I are going on a trip to Italy. We fly into Rome, get our car (probably this one)





















stay the first night in this crazy looking hotel/agroturismo about an hour outside of Rome:



















(if you're interested, here's the website)

and then from there, its 2 weeks of itinerary free chaos. I know I would like to visit thermal spas, and small towns, and eat local food with local people. Location-wise, who knows. Maybe we'll end up in Liguria, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria...Maybe we'll stay in Lazio. Maybe we'll flow up to Switzerland or Southern France. Maybe all the above. We'll do what we feel like. You got a problem with that? Didn't think so.



View Larger Map

-Ilya

ps Nicole thinks I'm an idiot with my dumb post