traveling in Tuscany

Just this month, I had the opportunity to take the trip of a lifetime with my father, my uncle, and his daughter–a little father/daughter trip–to the Tuscany region. Yes, the one in Italy! The last time I’d ever traveled outside of the US, it was a kinder, gentler world and therefore I’ve never even had a passport. So this spring, I was working on logistics like getting one of those and figuring out how to maximize the photographic opportunity of a lifetime. Packing clothes was kind of secondary! My awesome cousin worked super hard on the real logistics of the trip and she did an incredible job. Everything went really smoothly, except perhaps for actually driving from point A to point B, which I think couldn’t have gone much better than it actually did. We’ll just say that road markings in Italy are a bit different than they are here in the States and leave it at that. But the views on the drives were spectacular.

We started in Florence, or Firenze (that one took me a while to figure out, I’ll be honest), and then wandered through the countryside visiting smaller towns like Montalcino, Lucca, Chiusi, and Cortona. Everything was incredibly beautiful, and I really felt like I was inside an art book. I made a quick pass through my pictures and wanted to blog just a few.

view from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence:

A real Roman aqueduct (left) and a sunny alley in Lucca (right):

A field of grapevines in Tuscany:

Grapevine at a small winery outside Montalcino (left) and the morning view from our hotel there:

The same morning view, just looking a slightly different direction:

A crazy sun halo in Chiusi:

Broken column in ancient Rome (plus some poppies–all over Tuscany, I totally fell in love with them!):

I think this is the Ponte Garibaldi in Rome (we were standing on the Ponte Sisto):

If you made it this far, thanks for reading about how I spent my “summer” vacation.