From Fiesole to Ponte a Mensola... or not.

Caitlin has this really awesome book.  It’s called Walking and Eating in Tuscany and Umbria, and has maps and directions for a whole bunch of day hikes, half-day hikes, multi-day hikes, along with suggestions for places to eat along the way, etc.  These are not walks that take you past the famous locations and describe the pieces of art you’ll see in particular churches; these are walks up and down mountains, through olive groves, along backwoods mountain roads, and around the Tuscan country side.  The instructions include statements like: when you get to the bus stop, go behind the sign and look for a large rock.  Turn left, and follow the red and white blazes through a cypress forest until you get to a small road; follow this road, admire the view, and then turn right at the blue recycling bins.  And so on…  It also comes with a website where the authors (and other people who have followed the directions in the book) leave updates and comments about the various routes.  For example: 2 hours?  Maybe if you run; this route took us about 3-4.  Or: There aren’t any horses near that olive grove any more—don’t try to use them as a landmark.

One of the routes in the book goes from Fiesole (a small town in the hills around Florence—it actually predates Florence, and has Etruscan ruins and that kind of thing) up to the top of Mont Ceceri, then down again through Tuscan farmland to Ponte a Mensola, which is not far from our house.  We decided to pack a lunch and make a day of it—it was supposed to take about 3.5-4 hours.  We took a series of buses to Fiesole (and met a very nice elderly man on the bus, who talked to us the whole way, and gave us his address, in case we want to come visit him and practice our Italian—he’s the only one left of his family, and likes having company,) walked around Fiesole (beautiful views!  And some nice parks/benches to admire them from) 

for about an hour, and then set off, following the instructions in the book.  They took us off to a little side street and down what appeared to be someone’s driveway, where we had to squeeze around the car and onto a narrow, rocky channel with a high stone wall on either side that looked like it might not actually go anywhere.  

 But it was hard to make the description in the book lead anywhere else, so we followed it.  And followed it.  And started to think that maybe we were supposed to have taken the left fork back in Fiesole and not the right, but we decided to keep going just a little further (through the spiky vines hanging down into the path, and up and down steep rocky slopes, passed what we thought was a dead end and turned out to be just a sharp left) and then finally got to the end of the stone shoot, climbed up what was essentially a vertical slope, and found ourselves on a paved walking path at the entrance to a sort of state park with hiking trails—and found the red and white blazes we were supposed to be following!

At this point the book told us to watch the park signage carefully, because the trail to the peak took a sharp left off of the main path.  We found a sharp left, but very little signage (what signage there was said nothing about a peak), but took the left turn anyway.  And we did wind up where we were supposed to be—at a picnic area on a peak where Leonardo da Vinci took his first flight in one of his flying contraptions—although we think we got there by a slightly different route than the one the book described.  More stunning views along the way (I can understand why da Vinci wanted to launch himself off the mountain and fly over the Tuscan countryside)—and it was very peaceful and quiet. 

 

When you stopped walking, there was almost complete, utter silence, except for the light breeze through the trees, and church bells.  Also, today is an almost unbelievably beautiful day.  Clear blue sky, just enough sun to feel nice, a light breeze to keep you from getting too warm, and it smells like the leaves are just about to start turning colors.

We stopped for lunch (nice bread, cheese, oranges and plums, muesli (a sort of granola-type cereal), juice boxes, water, chocolate) at the peak, and then followed the book back down the mountain and into the Tuscan countryside.  The instructions took us through olive groves, 

over a bridge and into a woodsy area (always following the white and red blazes).  The book noted that we were always heading towards the castle with the tower that we could see in the distance.  If we got lost, we were to head for the tower.  All well and good.  Then we got to a road, with a gate (closed) that led to the tower.  Since we had come through the woods, we were on the inside of the gate, but half the fence next to the gate was missing, so we could hop over the low wall to the road.  Now, the problem was that we were supposed to take a right and head along a road or path to the castle.  There were three options to the right: a path into the woods (we tried that and decided it wasn’t going to the castle), the road on the inside of the closed gate, and the road on the outside of the closed gate, and the book’s instructions got a little fuzzy about which one we were supposed to take.  We took the one outside the gate, a sort of winding mountain road, figuring that a) the gate seemed to mean that the other road was closed to the public at the moment, and b) the red and white blazes led us over the wall to the outside of the gate.  We now think that was where we went wrong, because we never got to the castle.  We followed the red/white blazes until we got to a point where the road split (at this point we were completely off the book’s directions, since they hinged on getting to the castle.  We’d started off the edge of both the maps we had with up, too, so they weren’t any help), and a sign told us that Settignano lay in one direction, and another town in the other.  The blazes (very helpfully) went in BOTH directions.  Now, Settignano is another hill town around Florence, and the bus route that goes right by our house winds up there, so we went that way, figuring that at least we knew how to get home from there.

At this point, we’re hiking along the edge of a mountain road in Tuscany, heading for a town that we hoped wasn’t too far away, still admiring the panoramic views out over farmland.  I mean, really, if your going to wander around being lost, the Tuscan hills are not a bad place to do it.  

 And we weren’t really lost, because every once in a while we got to a road sign that told us Settignano was still THIS way.  And we had chocolate and water and each other for company, and most importantly, we have the language.  I was surprised at how confident and free knowing the language made me feel; we could read the signs, and talk to people, and most importantly, ask for directions.  Also, it was still only about 2 o’clock.  At one point, a guy in a truck stopped to ask us (in Italian) for directions to a particular castle—as it happened, we had passed a sign not long before, so we could help him.  Except that we think we sent him to the wrong castle.  There were two castles, the one we were looking for and another not too far away.  (What a bizarre statement that is: we think we sent him to the wrong castle by mistake.  You could NEVER say something like that anywhere in the US—oh, you know, there are so many castles in the area that it’s hard to keep them straight…).

Eventually we wound up at a fork in the road with a road sign giving the names of the two towns the fork led to—neither of which was Settignano.  Uh-oh.  We’d been following the signs, and had passed nothing that even remotely resembled a town (no “Welcome to Settengano, population: 500, or anything like that), so we picked a fork and cautiously followed it a little ways, and passed nothing except a bus stop for a line that went nowhere we recognized, and a sort of parking lot with steps leading down off of it.  So we backtracked to the parking lot, discovered that the steps lead to a street with houses, and called down to a man getting out of his car for directions.  He told us Settignano was about 2 kilometers farther down the road we were on.  We thank him and kept walking, debating how many kilometers there are to a mile, or vice-versa (none of us could remember).  Eventually we got to another fork in the road, this one with no signage whatsoever (but a great view) except for a poster about a lost cat, and stopped to sit on the wall and reconnoiter while eating some chocolate.  We flagged down the next car that went by, and asked which fork led to Settignano.  The couple in the car told us NEITHER fork, that in fact Settignano was back the way we’d come, but that it was too far to walk on foot, and that we ought to take the left fork, which led to Florence.  Right.  We debated a couple of things: A) How on EARTH did we manage to miss Settignano? There was NO WAY we’d walked anywhere near 2 km after stopping at the parking lot.  B) Florence was almost certainly too far away to walk to, given that we started a ways outside of Florence and then taken a bus about 20 minutes farther away, and had been walking along the mountains, not down out of them.  But we took the fork he said went to Florence anyway, since we at least knew it went in the right direction (down).

When we came around the curve, the view opened up, and we could see the Duomo in the distance.  It’s hard to feel lost when you can see the Duomo (it helped that it was still early afternoon on a beautiful day, and my feet weren’t tired yet), because then you know where Florence is, and so long as we kept going down, we were bound to get to a town with a bus stop eventually, and once you get close enough to Florence, all the bus lines go to the central bus station eventually, and we know how to get home from there.   And since you can SEE the Duomo, there’s a vague (if unrealistic, given the distances involved) sense that even if you didn’t find a bus stop, you could simply keep walking all the way into Florence, arrive at the Duomo, and take a left to our familiar bus stop and hop on the 10 and go home.  It didn’t come to that, though, because as we walked down, the road became more and more inhabited, until we seemed to be approaching the center of a small town.  We stopped to ask a woman if there was a bus nearby (I think she was actually American—her Italian was as accented as ours, and she seemed delighted to be asked directions in Italian, to have understood, and be able to answer in the same langugage), and there was one almost around the corner, and as we came around the corner, Sofi and Caitlin recognized the street, and where we were: Settignano.

Don’t ask me how we got there.  Either the man we asked directions from was wrong, or there are two ways to Settignano or else we hit a space warp somewhere along the way.  But we got there.  It wasn’t where we were supposed to end up had we followed the directions in the book, and it wasn’t where we expected to end up based on the guy’s directions, but we got there.  And got some gelato.  And took the bus five minutes down the road to our bus stop and home.

So that was today’s adventure.  I hope I haven’t rambled on too long.  The rest of the pictures will be posted on Facebook if you want to see them—I’ll post a link to them here once they’re up.