My family and I were rented a beautiful villa in Panzano. It was me, my husband, our young daughter and both of her grandmothers - my mother and my husband's mother. We had a rental car and became quite familiar, not to mention quite confident, about our ability to get around to all the wonderful places we wanted to visit on our journey through Tuscany. We spent much time driving on SR222 between Florence and Siena and visited all the wonderful little towns and villages along the way...Greve, Castellina, San Gimignano, etc.

One day we made a plan to visit a winery in Montalcino called Poggio Antico just south of Siena. With the two grandmothers and our daughter in the back seat, my husband drove and I dutifully sat next to him and read the map to guide us there successfully. It was the perfect visit, it was warm and sunny, we toured the winery, the wine was delicious and the wine with lunch continued to be delicious.

After a wonderful day it was time for us to start back to our villa in Panzano. I elected to be the designated driver to ensure we had a safe jouney home after some of us enjoyed more of the wine than others (if you know what mean). I took my place in the driver's seat and my husband proudly took on the role of the navigtor, he never gets lost (wink, wink). Our strategy was to take a bypass road around the city of Siena to get back to the villa as soon as possible to enjoy the rest of the hot day at the pool. Well lets just say that's when this story gets interesting.

We took a few wrong turns, then tried to double back to get back to the place we wanted to be and that strategy didn't work out so well. We suddenly found ourselves on streets with increasing amounts of pedestrian traffic. The stress level in the car was rapidly increasing and we really knew something was wrong when we eventually didn't see any other cars. We moved down the street at 5 miles per hour as people were parting like the Red Sea (while giving us dirtly looks I might add) to let us through.

After having been in Siena a couple of times already during our trip, I realized where we were...OMG, we were just one block off the Piazza del Campo! The streets were so narrow there wasn't really a place to pull over and park. Fortunately for us, my mother-in-law had really studied her Italian unlike myself who had made a bit of an effort by listening to lessons in the car about a month before departing for the trip.

We spotted a policeman casually standing off to the side chatting with a group and everyone was in violent agreement that she should be the one to get out of the car and ask for help. I didn't think my ability to say, "where is the train station" in Italian would help us very much. Secretly, I was hoping he would arrest all to get us out of the situation we were in as quickly as possible. No, that didn't happen, he acted like it was no big deal (#1 reason by the way I love Italy - the Italian people are so nice), told us not to worry and he would gave us directions as best he could to the point where he suggested 'once you get to this place find another policeman and ask for more directions...translation, this isn't going to be easy!

He so kindly stopped the pedestrian traffic so that we could take our next left onto the narrowest street I've ever driven on to this day - people were flat up against the buildings on each side so that we could pass. We navigated several more streets like that, a turn on the steepest hill I had seen (very scary in a car with manual transmission - at this point I made my husband drive) we found our way to a more car friendly area of the city and as directed found another policeman to ask for directions. We finally made our way out of the city, to the town of Panzano and back to the villa with our nerves barely intact.

Over a bottle of wine, by the pool that evening watching the sunset over the olive grove, we could finally laugh about our experience and wondered, 'How in the world did we end of up there?"

The End

Autor

  Lynne H.

Posición

  Siena

Categoría

  Momentos divertidos

Fecha de Publicación

21 ago 2014 - 10:41:42

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