Friday, 14 May 2010

We had intended being real tourists today but after packing up and having breakfast and going to the post office did make it "down town" until after 10.00am. Morning coffee in a bar near the San Lorenzo market, then we split for shopping. Had a good walk around the fresh food covered market near San Lorenzo - very clean, great presentation and variety - fish, meat, vegetables and of course ham, cheese, oil and lots of other goodies. You could easily have a couple of meals a day here. The meat and seafood looked to be good value. An interesting thing in Florence is to see wine tastings promoted alongside olive oil and balsamic vinegar tastings - these are also available to some extent in the market. Walked back to the hotel and had a light lunch at a' Birra on via San Gallo. We did not see most of the real accepted highlights in Florence, partly because we have both been here before and partly because this trip is not really about ticking off the sights of Europe - wandering the many narrow and historic streets and soaking up the atmosphere of this historic city was enough for us (plus shopping of course). The owner of the hotel, Roberto, had offered to drive us out to Peugeot and we accepted and his brother Marco drove us at 3.00pm - extremely generous to say the least - what service. The repair cost over 400 Euros which, after I faxed a report, Peugeot picked up - we knew this was one of the main differences between leasing a renting a vehicle, ie no excess on repairs, and we have proved the point (would have preferred not to find out the hard way). Finally left Florence just after 4.00pm on the autostrada towards the coast, passing Cinqeaterra (will see it next trip - check spelling) and on that amazing road passed Genoa that either goes through a tunnel or over a valley - lost cound of the number of tunnels, some of which are nearly 2Ks long. Just after 8.00pm we arrived at the B & B we had booked, named 5 Chimneys, in the little village of Pozzengo, north of Genoa and between Milan and Turin. We found it on the internet - very handy having the little Eee PC computer with us and wi fi in the hotel in Florence (tried to book at Camogli on the coast but no availability on a Friday night). The GPS worked this time otherwise it would have been hard to find - a small, pretty village in the hills of Piemonte. Wonderful house run by Georgio and his wife Patrizia. We booked dinner ahead and they gave us a great meal of Caprese - tomato, mozeralla and rucola salad, Puttenesca - penne pasta, olives, capers, tomatoes, oil, garllic, basil & parsely, followed by stuffed zuchinni flowers with gorgonzola, parmesan slice and slice of pear - this was all followed by gelato and accompanied by red wine made from Georgio's grapes - Barbera del Montferrato. Patrizia also brought out a bottle of lemoncello (when it came out of the freezer and could still be poured I knew the alcohol content was going to be pretty high). Similar to what we had last night, apparently it is made from a base of pure alcohol combined with lemon rind which is soaked for days and sugar - this is a bottle with a message and the message is beware - tastes great though.