Sicignano to Tuscany (1,410km)

We took a regional train from Sicignano to Napoli and then transferred onto one of the high speed Frecciarossa trains which was very comfortable and luxurious. They even serve you complimentary drinks and snacks, and Matt was impressed with the speeds the train would reach (up to 300km/hr). After a pleasant journey we arrived in Livorno and took a taxi to the Europcar office at the port to collect our hire car. We picked up our 4 door Lancia, set our route with Google Maps and started the drive to our Airbnb apartment in Altopascio which is about 40 minutes east of Florence. This first drive was a bit tense as we were both tired from the early start and long journey, plus Matt was still getting accustomed to sitting on the opposite side of the car and driving on the right hand side of the road. In addition we had Italian road signs to translate, speed limits to guess at, crazy Italian drivers and a totally different highway toll system to navigate. Despite this Matt kept his shit together and we arrived safe and sound in Altopascio in under an hour.

Our apartment was nothing too fancy but it seemed luxurious to us having come from our accommodation on the farm. We grabbed some groceries and got settled in.
Our host Paolina left us some helpful information about towns to visit in the local area so on our first day of sightseeing we decided to visit some of the smaller medieval hill towns which were in close proximity to us so that Matt could build up his confidence with some short drives before heading further afield.
The first town we visited was Montecarlo, just a 20 minute drive north of Altopascio. Here we also experienced our first encounter with the ZTL or Limited Traffic Zones which are common throughout towns and cities in Italy. We drove straight through the middle of the town (strictly zoned for local traffic only) but fortunately as Montecarlo is a very small town there were no cameras to capture our mistake so hopefully we avoided a fine on that one.
(Photos: Montecarlo; the Lancia hire car).

We managed to legally park just outside the old town walls and walked up through the town. It was like being instantly transported back in time. Although the town now has all the features and conveniences of modern life, the old buildings, cobblestone roads, towers and the fortress are still in perfect condition and it is not hard to imagine what life must have been like there centuries ago. Montecarlo was small but really charming and it was a great way to start our exploration of Tuscany. Most of Tuscany is known for producing red wine, however Montecarlo is well known for producing white wine so of course we did a tasting and bought a great bottle from a local salumeri. From Montecarlo we drove out to Montecatini Terme which is a town built on and around natural thermal springs. As such the main attraction of the town is the spas and luxury resorts which provide both relaxing and therapeutic spa services, the most popular of which is drinking the thermal water. We finished off the day with a drive to another slightly larger hill town at San Miniato, a town which is famous for its white truffles. Every September the town holds a festival to celebrate the truffle hunts. Matt tasted some truffle products and bought a small bottle of white truffle oil.
(Photos: Montecatini Terme; San Miniato).

Our second day of sightseeing in Tuscany Matt was feeling more confident on the road so we took a longer drive to the town of San Gimignano. San Gimignano is a larger medieval hill town and is very well preserved, so as such it draws a much larger tourist crowd than those towns we had previously visited. However even with the crowds we found San Gimignano to be our favourite Tuscan hill town. It is large enough to spend a whole day there but small enough to still have that small town feel.
We had a great time looking through the stores with locally made leather, tasting wild boar salami (a local speciality) and taking in the gorgeous old buildings. We also visited the Museo del Vino which is a museum dedicated to the Vernaccia white wine grape which is specific to the San Gimignano region. We did a fabulous wine tasting at the museum and then enjoyed taking in the views on the drive home, particularly the endless fields of thousands of sunflowers in bloom.

(Photos: San Gimignano town; plenty of delis with salami and cheeses; Museo del Vin0; sunflowers).

On our third day of sightseeing Matt was feeling quite at home on the road so we took our longest drive to Siena which was a little over 1.5 hours away. Siena is one of the largest medieval towns in Tuscany and it draws large crowds of tourists due to it's shopping, close proximity to the Chianti wine region and spectacular architecture. Siena is also famous for the horse race that is held in the town every year in the main piazza in the centre of town.
We packed ourselves a picnic lunch of cheese, salami, bread and beer and ate our lunch in a park with a view out over the town before we took a walk around the town to take in the sights. Siena is a beautiful town but it felt much more like a city and had a different vibe to San Gimignano.
(Map: Altopascio (north), San Gimignano, Siena (south).
(Photos: Siena).

On our final day in Tuscany we took a short 25 minute drive to the town of Pisa to see the Leaning Tower. As with all the Tuscan towns we had to park just outside of the central business district and the walk in. Walking through the streets of Pisa we came across the large Piazza del Duomo quite suddenly and unexpectedly and it really was an impressive sight. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is the freestanding bell tower for the Pisa Cathedral, and these two buildings along with the Baptistery of San Giovanni are all housed in the Piazza del Duomo. It was a hot summer day and there was a large crowd in the piazza and very little shade. We walked around the entire piazza to take in the buildings from every angle and we had Rick Steve's free audio guide to give us an informative tour of the piazza. We had the option to climb the tower for a 18 euro each and we considered doing this, but then we saw the enormous line up and decided against it. The tower was impressive enough from the ground. Also it is clearly structurally unstable.

(Photos: Piazza del Duoma; Leaning Tower of Pisa).

The next day we checked out at 10am and made the leisurely drive

back to Livorno where we returned our hire car without issue and made our way to the train station for our onward journey to Florence.

Observations of Tuscany......

We thought the Tuscan region would be primarily rural agricultural land but in reality it is a highly populated region with many decent sized towns and plenty of industrial areas as well. It was not the same as driving through a country area in Australia where you can drive for an hour and see nothing but trees and farmland. Italy is a densely populated country and so I really don't think many areas of the country could qualify as being 'isolated' in the sense that we think of.
Nevertheless it was truly beautiful and every day we would come across views that looked like they were straight off a postcard.
Hiring a car was definitely the way to go to explore Tuscany, as we would not have been able to reach most of the towns that we visited without a car. It also allowed us to get away from the big bus crowds of tourists and gave us the freedom to go wherever we wanted.

Things we loved.....

Wine! - The wine in Italy is all fucking fabulous but the wine in Tuscany is particularly good. We did not have a bad bottle of wine the entire trip. I cannot overemphasise how absolutely delightful the wine was.

Sunflowers - fields of thousands of sunflowers in bloom, it was so cheerful it could almost make you sick.

Things we did not love.....

Rubbish collection - they have a weird system in Tuscany which was hard for us to understand. They have different coloured bins for different types of waste to be collected on different days of the week. There was a complicated timetable in the apartment advising which rubbish we should put in in different coloured bin bags on different days of the week. At first we tried our best, but then we started to notice that some other residents in the complex were just putting out bags of randomly mixed rubbish in bags on the side of the road. Then locals dogs/cats would get at the bags and there would be rubbish all over the street. If their system was a little less complex people might actually comply with it rather than just saying "fuck it" and putting everything out on the street (which is what we did in the end).
Tuscan roadside prostitutes - on day one we saw a girl in full makeup with revealing red dress just sitting on the roadside on a plastic chair in the middle of nowhere. We couldn't figure out what she was doing and at first we thought maybe she was waiting for a bus or something. Then we started seeing lots of different girls on different Tuscan roads sitting on chairs on the middle of nowhere. After some googling we confirmed that these are indeed Tuscan country roadside hookers. You accept that there are hookers on the streets in cities, but it was a surprise to see them on the side of a country road.