{"id":6561,"date":"2016-12-23T08:13:06","date_gmt":"2016-12-23T13:13:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.migrate.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/?p=6561"},"modified":"2026-05-27T12:09:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T16:09:15","slug":"tuscany-villages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/2016\/12\/tuscany-villages\/","title":{"rendered":"Tuscany: Villages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With San Quirico d&#8217;Orcia as our home base, we frequently visited&nbsp;Pienza,&nbsp;Monticchiello, and&nbsp;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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Amarcord\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Fellini&#8217;s <em>Amarcord<\/em><\/a>, maybe we were.<\/p>\nngg_shortcode_0_placeholder\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With San Quirico d&#8217;Orcia as our home base, we frequently visited&nbsp;Pienza,&nbsp;Monticchiello, and&nbsp;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&nbsp;local cuisine and wines. Typically being exhausted from the hike up hill to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1093,495],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-europe","7":"category-italy","8":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1FUJv-1HP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6561"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18219,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6561\/revisions\/18219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.edwardbacon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}