After leaving Pisa we traveled to Siena which was a lovely city, I only wish we would of had more time to explore it. From Siena we picked up our rental car and drove about hour in half to Tuscany. Or as most Europeans call it Toscana. Now, if your thinking of backpacking or traveling to Italy and want to go to Tuscany and then head down South like we did to Naples or Capri then trust me when I say DO NOT pick up your car in Siena.   This was probably our biggest mistake of our trip, the reason being is we backtracked up north to return the car in Siena and then we hopped on the train in Siena and headed down south to Naples by passing Tuscany again – just where we had been!! We probably wasted 4 hours of travel that we did not need to do!! Instead take a train to Chiusi and pick your car up there – explore Tuscany and then return your car back in Chiusi and head south down to Naples from Genoa.

OK, so that is my one piece of advice, we had to learn the hard way! So we spent two nights in Tuscany – Tuscany is not a town but a region. Within the region of Tuscany there are several beautiful hill towns to stay in. Mike and I choose to stay in Montepulciano, a beautiful little hill town that is well known for it’s wine and it’s fine art galleries. Not every hill town in Tuscany is known for their wine – you would think all of them are well known but that’s not true. We really wanted to taste the local wines and explore the galleries so that is why we choose Montepulciano.

We took advantage of all the beautiful and quaint wine tours not to mention the delicious wine…=)

Montepulciano had the most amazing cheese and meat markets. We would meander along the main street and stop here and there and try their samples. We brought plenty home to enjoy.

This picture is of a little doggy who was just so cute. I never was sure if he had a home or not, he seemed to live in the square but he did have a water bowl that someone had put out and he seemed like he was being fed. What breaks my heart the most is seeing dogs that don’t have homes and we saw quite a bit of that in Rome and in Southern Italy.  At one point I was so overwhelmed with seeing them in Sorrento that I saved some bread after dinner and as we were walking back to our hotel I tried to give some to them but not one dog ate the bread!! I told Mike I think it’s because they are used to having the best Italian food scraps in the world and stupid ol’ bread isn’t even good for these homeless dogs! I finally gave up and threw the bread away.

The best part was coming home from a long day exploring Tuscany and having a glass of wine waiting for us up on the terrace.

Below is our hotel – Meuble il Riccio. Gio and Ivanna run this little place with their son and his wife. It only has 6 rooms and they truly took care of us, we were so sad to leave them.

Look in the far right picture below, that cute little dog pops up again.

Finally, here is our car! Wow! That was a long post!