(Mark is doing most of the blogging these days as I am being lazy!)
As with part of our time in Barcelona and Bellagio, I ended our stay in Florence with a visit to the Laundromat this morning, one must have clean clothes! The people in the little café next door couldn’t speak a word of English but understood my awful Italian well enough to produce a fine espresso coffee to get me through the washing!
Tip – how to get a good cheap coffee in Italy – (1) don’t sit, go stand at the bar, and (2) act like you know what you’re doing! After all, doesn’t everyone do this?
Washing done, we packed up and headed for Cortona, the nearest town to our Agriturismo accommodation at Convent di Novole. It’s about 10 km from Cortona and was once a convent (duh). Our ‘chapel’ accommodation was quite literally a very small old chapel, with a small loft built into to act as the bedroom, and kitchen off to the side. Novole quite literally feels like it is in the middle of nowhere – there’s no tv, very intermittent iPhone reception, and a long winding dirt road into it. Our small front‑wheel drive Peugot really struggled to get down the hill to Novole, I’m sure going up will be loads of fun.
Knowing we would be going off the map (literally, the sat nav has no idea where we are) we visited a supermercato (yes that’s the correct spelling!) in a little village called Camucia at the bottom of the hill that Cortona is on. Whilst this wasn’t the first supermercato we had been into, it was probably the biggest. Good fish, huge meat range (they cut it off the bone for you), and any type of alcohol you might want. So salmon and red wine for dinner sounded pretty good to us!
We were welcomed at Novole by Giro, the son of Lucio the owner. It was all pretty easy and it turned out to be a simple evening. The only twist on the night was a small black scorpion which turned up in the bathroom. It sat there for a while and there disappeared, probably into the walls.
Michelle says: And we were greeted by two dogs and two pussycats – so we got to cuddle with some animals for the afternoon, which was pretty cool indeed. Pepito and Viola are the two dogs, seemingly Pepito is being trained to scrounge out truffles, and Viola is a big white boxer type dog with one of those butt ugly but loveable faces. Emelia the cat, a very sooky tortoiseshell, and Buddha, a grey cat who makes a LOT of noise also came to say hi.
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