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Frommer's Favorite Experiences
Exploring the Back Roads: Rural Tuscany and Umbria just beg to be explored by car, and your own set of wheels really is the only way to discover the hidden side of these often overtouristed regions. Just picture yourself winding your way among olive groves and forests on back roads, cruising past vineyards and waving fields of emerald grass dotted with sheep. You'll find tiny medieval villages that don't appear in any guidebook, and you'll turn off at every VENDITA DIRETTA (direct sales) sign to meet the vintner or farmer and sample his wine, herb-scented honey, or home-pressed olive oil. Buy the best regional map you can find, fill the tank, and get ready to put your rental car to the test on dirt roads, steep mountain switchbacks, and the occasional manic Italian highway.
Enjoying a 3-Hour Dinner: A simple pleasure, but one that can make for a most memorable evening. Good friends, good conversation, and good wine can easily extend a meal for hours, and the Italian dinner is a perfect excuse and vehicle, what with four or five major courses, big pauses in between, and cheese, dessert, coffee, and digestivo liqueur all lined up at the end.
Catching Festival Fever: Italians will throw a festa at any excuse -- the local saint's day, the harvest, boar-hunting season, or sometimes just because it's the second Tuesday in May. Flower-strewn streets, fountains spewing wine, solemn religious processions, people in Renaissance garb shooting crossbows, horse and footraces through medieval streets, big roasting spits of wild birds, mass blessings of sheep and Fiats, violent Renaissance soccer, jousting matches, High Masses, and vats bubbling with polenta -- you never know what you'll be in for, but it's bound to be memorable.
Haggling in Florence's San Lorenzo Street Market: Every day, the streets around the Mercato Centrale and San Lorenzo are filled with proprietors hawking marbleized paper, knockoff Gucci silk scarves, T-shirts emblazoned with Michelangelo's David, and wallets, purses, jackets, and other leather products galore. All the stall keepers promise "the lowest prices in Florence." That so-called lowest price is usually far from it, and the best part of shopping here is using every bargaining trick in the book to drive the "lowest price" even lower.
Hiking the Hills of Florence: The walk from Florence up to Fiesole is famous enough to earn a scene in the movie adaptation of E. M. Forster's A Room with a View (even if they cheated and took carriages). But don't neglect the hills of San Miniato and Bellosguardo that rise south of the Arno; the views over the city here are closer at hand, and the land is less developed.
Biking Lucca's City Walls: The elegant Republic of Lucca is still snuggled comfortably behind its 16th-century walls, ramparts so thick they were able to be converted into a narrow city park -- a tree-lined promenade running a 4.9km (3-mile) loop around the city rooftops. The bicycle is the preferred mode of transportation in Lucca, and you'll be in good company as you tool under the shade past parents pushing strollers, businessmen walking their dogs, and old men at picnic tables in their 40th year of a never-ending card game.
Picnicking Under the Leaning Tower: Pisa is home to the most felicitously gorgeous piazza in all of Italy, the Campo dei Miracoli. Even if you're in town for just half a day, grab a sandwich or a slice of pizza and picnic on the small triangle of grass in front of the famous leaning tower -- the campanile with the world's worst posture. Afterward, saunter down to the patch of green surrounding the baptistery and take a nap on the grass with the sun warming your face. And, oh yeah: You can climb the tower, too.
Taking an Evening Stroll in Perugia: Perugia's wide Corso Vannucci is perfect for the early-evening stroll Italians everywhere turn out for -- the passeggiata. It's the time to see and be seen, to promenade arm in arm with your best friend dressed in your best duds. The crowd flows up the street to one piazza and then turns around and saunters back down to the other end. When you tire of meandering, take a break to sip cappuccino and nibble Perugia's fine chocolates in one of the classy cafes lining the street.
Going Off the Beaten Path in Assisi: Who would've thought you could find a primal Tuscan country experience in overtouristed Assisi? Save the basilica's frescoes for the afternoon and get up early to hike into the wooded mountains of Monte Subasio to St. Francis's old hermitage. After a morning spent in contemplation with the monks and wandering the state parkland, head back to Assisi, but be sure to stop a mile outside town for a big lunch at La Stalla, one of the last die-hard countryside trattorie in central Italy.
Note: This information was accurate when it was published, but can change without
notice. Please be sure to confirm all rates and details directly with the companies in question before
planning your trip.
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