The much-looked-forward-to Sunday lie-in started our day, and we rose at a leisurely 9am to have breakfast on the patio in the warm morning sunshine while we discussed our plans for the day- first on the agenda was to get back to green-fingered activities.
We left Goose Island alone today - short of knocking in a few more fence posts, there's not much else we can do to it now until we get hold of some chicken wire (and lots of it), so instead we opted to work on the 'garden' the area immediately around the house - we couldn't mow the lawn without a mower, but there was still plenty to do.
We thus busied ourselves all day until around 4.30pm, only stopping for a quick lunch of leftover potato salad with the obligatory bread drizzled in oil and couple of slices of salami.
We finally got around to planting the potted shrubs we had bought back in July, dug out two small trees that were in a poor state of health and fighting with the olive trees on the edge of the lawn, planted some more vegetable seeds (mainly cavolo nero, but also some carrots - but only in pots of course as we don't yet have a terrace prepared for planting), strimmed the terrace/path towards the quarry - where Helen found another huge pile of blocks and slate that needed extracting and barrowing to the other side of the house - cut back the growth on the stone walls, weeded the patio and steps up to the house, and made a start at re-strimming the rather neglected terraces on the far side of the house. All in all, it was very productive day that has made a huge difference to the look of the place - we have been so focussed on other goals recently that we hadn't fully appreciated how much we needed to devote some attention to the garden area.
At about 4.30pm, we called time on the back-breaking garden work, so we showered and headed out to Sorana to see if we could find the Sorana bean festival that we'd seen posters for this weekend. Sorana itself is only a small village perched up on a ridge, but beneath it there are two good restaurants so we reasoned that one or both of these must be hosting it. The first seemed very busy, but not really any more so than on a normal Sunday, and there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary, so we drove on to the next but this place - but that was really quiet! We were also a little baffled by the fact that the posters we'd seen previously seemed to have disappeared. Anyway, we soon gave up, did an about-turn and instead decided to drive up through Vellano to Goraiolo to the cafe/bar/restaurant that had hosted the African bongos evening back at the end of June. We knew they were open all day, but on arriving there we found out that the kitchen didn't open until 7pm. At this point it had only just turned 6pm, so we decided to head back home to feed the cats and shut them in for the night, then head into Pescia.
When we arrived in Pescia, the town was absolutely buzzing - we had forgotten that today was the start of the Palio week. The square was full of people milling around and there were people walking the streets all around - it felt like a different place! We wandered around for half an hour before deciding to head back to the rather sophisticated wine bar that we first went to all those months ago the first night we arrived in Pescia.
We took the small table just inside behind the window so that we could watch the Italians go about their Palio business while we sipped a glass of lovely Nero D'Avola wine and helped ourselves to the free buffet. We hadn't been here since May, our drive to keep costs down having kept us out of there for nearly four months, so this felt like an absolute treat and we left feeling like we were on holiday - no Sunday night blues or impending doom in sight! We headed back out of town, but pulled over on the way for a takeaway pizza to take home, we figured we'd earned it this weekend.
Initially, we went into a restaurant that had opened/reopened under new management that advertised pizza da asporto (takeaway pizza), thinking we'd support the new enterprise in town. However, after a few minutes of watching the chaos unfolding in the kitchen while we were steadfastly ignored (we think they need a visit from Gordon Ramsay, or even better our friend Dave Watts), we turned on heels having not even been able to place an order. Instead, we walked the couple of hundred yards back along the pavement to Quadrifoglio - a takeaway pizza place we had frequented once before - and soon we were heading home with a pizza fresh out of the wood-fired oven.
By the time we got in it was 9.30pm - we couldn't quite believe where the evening had gone, considering that we had first left the house at around 5pm. We realised we hadn't even started the blog yet, but the day's labouring in the garden had taken its toll and we decided to collapse on the sofa with our pizza and deal with the blog in the morning - so apologies to anyone that looked for it last night only to find nothing there!
Despite the fact that we barely left the house all weekend and worked hard for the best part of it, we've had a thoroughly enjoyable weekend - and we hope for more of the same in the future!
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