Pistoia and nearby villages

We did not do much planning for this trip, only have one thing booked for our entire stay, and it is on our second to last day in Milan, so we have lots of down time to do whatever we want.

Today started not exactly as we expected, we woke up at 9:30AM! Andre thought breakfast finished at 9:30, I remembered being told 10AM, luckily I was right and we managed a quick breakfast before heading out on the road for the day. 

First stop this morning is Pistoia, a town that we had not visited before. Parking in Italy is always fun, we are never 100% sure if we need to pay or not, if we are in a legal spot or not, but the blue lines seem to always work well for us. If we only understood which days were free. Oh well we load up the meter to get a ticket to display in our car window and off we go. The cars around us all seem to have tickets displayed in the window from the meter, so we do think we need to pay. 

Picture of our license plate in case we can't find the car later, and a picture of the street we are parked on

We had a nice walk through the city, because of our dislike of parking we tend to park a little outside the old parts of the city and walk in, we just need to remember exactly where we park the car. There are quite a few buses parked near us, so we figure we are in a good spot to start our touring. We stopped and visited a few churches walking on the way to the center of town.

These are the streets I love in Europe

The market is in town today, which is always fun. It is a huge market, seemed like different vendors in every square. Fun to see, but it also takes away from some of the beautiful squares with all of these vans parked in them. There is a beautiful Basilica here with a separate Baptism building, we haven’t seen a lot of these, I do remember the beautiful one in Florence. 

Public toilets and showers, passed on taking a shower here

We found a great info center in Pistoia that gave us lots of maps and ideas to do while we are around. We aren’t planning on revisiting much that we have already seen in Tuscany, so we are happy to get some off the beaten track info that tourists aren’t typically looking for. We didn’t want to drive for too long today, but did want to see a bit more so headed out after a couple of hours in Pistoia.

Great reference for where Montecatini is between Lucca and Pistoia, plus all the castles Andre will probably have us try to find over the week

On the way out, we decided to check out a section of the wall. They just closed and we could not get in to visit and walk that section of the wall.

Our first stop on the next part of our adventure is to see the Tower of Barbarossa in the medieval village of Serravalle Pistoiese. Again we parked just outside town and walked in. This was very lucky because when we got out of the car we could see on the bank below us that people were out harvesting olives. This was a great find as we have never seen this, and would have missed it totally if we hadn’t parked here. Some men were picking by hand on the lower branches, and others were up on ladders for the higher branches. There were mats on the ground that the olives were dropped onto. We enjoyed watching them work for a while then moved on to find the tower. This is a very small village and easy to find the tower, which we were able to climb. Some very pretty views of the area. 

So many tourists out exploring.

Last steps to the top were a ladder

Very pretty views from the top 

Next we decided to move onto the town of Monsummano Alto to find a castle. Again we totally lucked out as on the drive up the narrow road we came across some hunters out hunting for wild boar with their dogs. There were about 50 hunters out, cars parked all over the narrow road. They had a pickup with about a dozen boar in it. Another first for us today. We often see boar in something on menus in restaurants, lots of time a boar pasta dish. Some nice views again from here. 

Finally had a sandwich for lunch at around 4PM. It was a soggy tomato sandwich, but at this point we were very hungry so the soggy sandwich from the coffee shop had to do.

From here we tried to find another castle that we had read about, but never could find it and it is starting to get dark so decided to head home.

We stopped to pick up a couple of bottles of wine to have in our hotel room on the way home. When we arrived at the hotel we borrowed the bartenders corkscrew to open our wine. The bartender told us about a veranda that had nice views at the end of our floor, but a little too cold to stay out for too long. The bartender also loaded us up with some snacks to go with the wine.

We walked around town before supper. The town has Xmas decorations out.  Looks like we may have missed some type of market in the main square as all there was still open was the candy seller.

Supper tonight was at the sister hotel from our hotel that is on the main square. They have a special for 20.00 Euro every night for a 3 course meal, a great deal. We had a nice meal, but doubt we will be back, there are so many other places to explore here.

We see when we get back that there is a tour of a farm/vineyard tomorrow night being offered, but we decide to pass on this since it only starts at 6:30 PM and will be in the dark. I think we definitely would have done it if it would have been a day tour where we could have seen more of the area.

Saturday Day 2 15,800 steps