My husband and I spent two weeks in Venice, Tuscany and Florence back in October 2002.
The absolute hightlight was an unexpected trip to Montalcino. We were renting a farmhouse in Rampalano (sp??) and the owners of the house told us about a festival called the "Festival of the Thrush" being held in Montalcino that weekend. In very broken English (and our very limited command of Italian) they told us there would be food, music and most of all wine. But that we needed to show up early. Being the NY'ers that we are, we thought we needed to get there around 7:00 a.m. . . . but in Italy, that really means by around 10:00.
We got in the car and hit the road. We saw amazing countrysides, olive groves, vineyards . . . all the while getting lost. We somehow found our way and still managed to get to Montalcino before 10:00. The town was getting crowded and we somehow managed to very quickly find a place to park.
We had no idea what to expect so we just started walking. We briefly wandered around the town checking out the sites before we hit the fortezza, the town fortress, which we do in every town. We needed a bathroom stop and figured we would kill two birds with one stone and headed for the fortezza. As we wandered in we were met with sights, sounds and best of all smells to delight the senses. We found stands serving local foods and wines. . . wild boar, homemade cheese, the best Brunello de Montalcino we have ever tasted, etc.. Being that it was the festival of the Thrush, there were small thrushes being roasted on a large spit.
There were very few lines which enabled us to taste soo much in a short time. The brunello we drank was an amazing '95 for about 7.00 euros a glass. We stuffed our faces with "boresta" which many years later, we finally found out was wild boar pate. It was soo good we had to take a picture of it.
After awhile the parade in honor of the Festival of the Thrush made its way into the Fortezza, as did hundred and hundreds of other travelers. At this time the lines become somewhat unmanageable and we realized we had done it right. No lines for food . . . great spot to see the parade . . . no lines for the bathrooms. We had no idea what we were doing nor what to expect so it turns out . . . ignorance in this case, was indeed bliss.
We ate to our hearts content . . . saw amazing sights . . . drank fantastic wine all the while constantly being one step ahead of the crowd.
This is held the last weekend in October . . .you can get lots of info about it here [
http://www.montalcino-tuscany.it/sagra_del_tordo.htm]
This trip pre-dated my first digital camera so I was only able to scan a few pictures of this day, but you can check them out here. [
http://sharynandmike.com/gallery/v/T...y/Montalcino/]