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