Italy Day 12 - The perils of poor pre-planning and a trip to Siena

If you've been keeping score at home, you may have noticed that we've picked up some wine on this trip. You may also have noticed I haven't talked about how we're getting said wine home. As many times as we've been in Cali. we've always gotten a cardboard and Styrofoam shipper and either mailed home or taken the packs as checked bags on the plane. What we didn't stop to consider on this trip is manhandling a cardboard box of wine thru SFO with a luggage cart is pretty straightforward. Navigating the public transportation system and cobblestone streets in Italy, not as straightforward.

None of the wineries we visited had case shippers, so we stopped by the local Mailboxes Etc and discovered they had wine shippers...but only 6 bottle boxes. It quickly became clear that two of these boxes would hold the wine, but wouldn't be a practical solution. We had a brief moment of insanity where we considered Amazon Priming a wine suitcase to our hotel in Florence. Fortunately that passed quickly. Kris did some digging and found the the GIANT Banfi winery sells wine luggage at their tasting room in Montalcino.

Since we were planning on going to Siena today, this was a short detour to pick up something that we should have done years ago in California. We jog over to the Banfi Castle...and feel like we've stepped into all of the worst elements of a California tasting room. I am pretty certain the guy running the tasting room sniffed derisively at us when we walked in. And thing went downhill from there. Had we been smart, we would have picked up the bag and left, but we decided to actually taste the wines while we were there. The short version - The wines were pretty unremarkable, the tasting was way too pricey, and the staff was inattentive at best and downright rude to us at worst. If we didn't really need the case bag to ensure that the rest of our trip wasn't miserable, we would have left in a huff. Net however is we now have a case wine bag that's pretty slick and you get a strong recommendation to avoid the Banfi Castle at all costs.

With that experience behind us, we were off to Siena. We thought that seeing Siena right before we left for Florence would provide an interesting juxtaposition since the two cities have been rivals for centuries. Siena's cathedral is riotous in stripes and ornamentation. The inside is breathtaking as well even with much of the floors covered in carpet and the pulpit under wraps for restoration. The Piccolomini Library is a can't miss for music lovers with it's illustrated hymnals.

The crypt has a truly amazing exhibit right now of artifacts and treasures from churches destroyed in the 2016 earthquake. They've created an awesome fusion of modern and ancient by projecting news footage of the earthquake rescue teams and before and after videos of the various churches on the ancient brick walls of the crypt along side the artifacts that you can watch being pulled from the rubble. It's a very powerful display and one of the best uses of multimedia I've seen anywhere. Really impressive!

We decided to head back to Grosseto for a last dinner in town. We still needed to pack and we wanted to tidy up, even though friend said they were sending someone to clean. We are so sad to be leaving this charming city! If it weren't for friend's generous offer of their place, I don't know that we ever would have come to Grosseto, and now we're planning on how and when we'll come back! It's been a great jumping off point to see Tuscany and really, there's still so much to see here. Until tomorrow then...