Tuscany: Villages


With San Quirico d’Orcia as our home base, we frequently visited Pienza, Monticchiello, and Montisi throughout the week. The hilltop villages include narrow and steep stone cart-ways that lead to public squares. The villages feature spectacular vistas of surrounding olive groves and vineyards that supplied the local cuisine and wines. Typically being exhausted from the hike up hill to a plaza, each afternoon we spent as much time recovering, eating cheese and drinking wine as we did photographing. I realized that these hills and stones provided sanctuary to people for centuries. Each village fostering its own heritage and micro-culture. I would love to go back and spend time exploring them again. As an aside, in Montisi, a motor cyclist kept buzzing through the streets, as if in a re-make of Fellini’s Amarcord, maybe we were.

For more images and prints please visit my Tuscany Gallery