august77

Hello

I will be going to Tuscany May 10-21 2016 as a solo traveller.

I will be staying in Florence St Regis for 5 days and then the next 5 days in Siena Grand continental.

I would like to take day trips from Siena to other towns. Which tours and destinations would you recommend? I am open to hiring a private driver too if that is an option.

Thank a lot in advance

Cjar

You may want to use Internet / guidebooks to see which day trips most interest you. We were only in Siena one night, but we did use Hill and Road to get a lovely tour of smaller towns in Tuscany. It included a farm to table meal. Terrific company. Ours was a private tour. I don't know if they offer group tours if that is what you are looking for.
We loved Pienza and Montalcino, both fairly close together as I recall.

Cjar

Also, we had a terrific meal at Taverna di San Guiseppe in Siena and some pretty good pizza on the run at the Consorzio Agraria as well as stocking up on gifts of food for friends and relatives.
By the way it is Hills and Roads ,but I couldn't get the link to come up. I hope they're still around.

StuDudley

Here is something I posted several years about scenic drives in Tuscany.

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...y-171368-2.cfm

Stu Dudley

dreamon

http://tiemmespa.it/ will provide bus timetables for the region and Siena is a bit of a transport hub for this having both train and bus. Pienza, Montalcino, Montepulciano, San Gimignano, etc, all available by bus. trenitalia.com for train timetables.

august77

The destinations I have in mind are Chianti and San gimignano. Someone suggested chiusi. How about that one? Thank you

StuDudley

I think the Val d'Orcia south of Siena is much more scenic than Chianti. San Gimingano is interesting to explore before 11AM and after 5PM when the day-trippers are not there. I've been to Chiusi several times to get on or off a train - and I can't imagine why anyone would visit it and not Orvieto, Montepulciano, Montalcino, or Pienza.

Stu Dudley

august77

Thanks stu Dudley
I live in Seattle and did find the SF food scene amazing. You mentioned in your report Tuscany cooking was not your favorite. Did that include Florence? Any favorites in Florence? I eat seafood mostly.

As for destinations, I am considering San gimignano, montepulcianl , montalcino and pienza. I may contact the grand continental hotel concierge to see if the suggest any private drivers.

Cjar

I'm not an expert, but I think you could do all four of those in five days and still get to spend a little time in Siena. Happy travels.

StuDudley

>> Did that include Florence? Any favorites in Florence?<<

We did dine at two places that were good - but I forgot what they were.

>>I eat seafood mostly.<<

We found very little seafood on the menus in Tuscany. My wife pretty much only eats seafood too - and she had problems. It is amazing that Tuscany - being so close to water, doesn't have that much seafood on menus compared to France - which has seafood on almost all the menus everywhere - even in the Alps.

Stu Dudley

august77

Stu Dudley : Well, good to know in advance. A later trip to France sounds tempting have only been to Paris once

Cjar: I agree. I hope to be able to do them in such a short time. Still looking for tours or private driver. I will contact the hotel concierge too.

Thank you

sandralist

There is a very long Tuscan seacoast where that is overflowing with seafood, where you will find several quite famous Tuscan restaurants that serve almost nothing but seafood, several with Michelin stars. If you do a google search for Florence, an international city, there are several highly regarded seafood restaurants in Florence, also several with Michelin stars. But there are also more modest places, generally run by southern Italians.

However, if you go to the smaller, inland villages/towns of Tuscany, you will find that people continue the agricultural traditions of the red wine-country and live close to the land and the natural product of the land. These tradtions pre-date the invention of the automobile and refrigerator trucks and train cars. Much of interior Tuscany -- as you are finding out -- is still not connected by train and truck highways, and It is not easy or cheap to rush fresh seafood from the coast to the interior of Tuscany, and Italians prefer not to eat frozen food.

It is not easy to find good seafood in Sacramento or much of inland California in my experience. Only in the most affluent restaurants away from the coast will you find anything but frozen seafood. Don't know what they do in France, but in Italy, it is against the law to offer frozen seafood in a restaurant without marking it with an asterisk on the menu so the customer knows it is not fresh.

Most of the cuisine of the interior of Tuscany is based on pork and beef. If you don't like to eat meat, you will eat better in the interior of Tuscany if you eat seasonal vegetable dishes rather than fish. If you try to eat in Tuscany like you do in Seattle, San Francisco or France, you are making a mistake.

StuDudley

>>It is not easy to find good seafood in Sacramento or much of inland California in my experience. Only in the most affluent restaurants away from the coast will you find anything but frozen seafood<<

I've lived in California all of my 68 years, and that is certainly not my experience. My wife & I have lived on or near the coast - so I checked "inland" cities/areas on Opentable, and found:

15 of 15 restaurants I surveyed in the Wine Country has seafood on the menu - multiple types of seafood. This included a steakhouse in a gambling casino,

10 out of 10 restaurants in Sacramento has multiple seafood choices - including a Black Angus steakhouse and a Whiskey Bar & Grill

5 out of 5 restaurants in the northern San Joaquin area has multiple seafood choices.

I selected the first 15, 10, 5 restaurants presented by Opentable - I did not "cherry pick". There are certainly more than 15 restaurants in the Wine Country & Sacramento - but when I found 30 out of 30 restaurants has seafood - I determined that there was a "trend". I also did not include fried calamari or fried shrimp as a "seafood". Many of the restaurants had oysters, mussels, clams, Salmon, black cod, and petrale sole - all most likely fresh.

I had octopus for dinner last night and fresh dungeness crab for brunch today.

Stu Dudley

sandralist

I wrote in my post:

>>Only in the most affluent restaurants away from the coast will you find anything but frozen seafood<<

You say you didn't cherry pick, but you seem unaware that the area of the planet you are analyzing is one of the most affluent in the entire world. Not only does it have a top layer of wealth living there, it attracts an affluent tourist trade.

Even if the OP has plenty of money, he/she isn't going to the wine country of California. She/he is going to the wine country of Tuscany, which historically has been quite poor and which has no local traditon of eating seafood, and a very strong local tradition of preserving the local culture in cooking and food production. It is hot in the central valleys of Italy, and there is no highway system or centralized food system to support bringing fresh-caught seafood from the coast to the interior, and no airport system to support bringing in salmon and dungeness crab from distant places.

Italy has suffered a major economic downturn for more than a dozen years. Italians do what they can in the tourist centers to support the affluent, globalized tastes of visiting Americans, but it can't seriously compete with Northern California and Seattle, where people think nothing of importing all their food, overfishing or destroying their landscape to grow things like rice and almonds where they cannot be environmentally sustained. Italy is not a centralizing, conformity imposing nation like France either, where food is distrubuted from centralized locations to restuarants, and farming and fishing is run along nationalized lines.

Tuscany deserves to be understood and appreciated for what it is: a very large region of Italy with a very long seacoast and beautiful interior valleys that have their own local traditions which the locals prize and cherish. If you want seafood in Tuscany, go to the Tuscan coast like the Tuscans do. If you are in the valleys, don't turn your nose up at the local homegrown food and wonder what on earth is wrong with these people that they cant be more like the French and put out-of-season, out-of-locality food on the table. And why no internet site to make reservations online, for god's sake?

Italy is a joy to visit precisely because it has saved its connection to the land and ignored the clock and a great many other things people tag as "progress" and "modern" and "sophisticated" and "cosmopolitan" that have actually been really destructive of human life and happiness.

It is so easy to find in the San Joaquin Valley or the Napa Valley all the things an affluent, globalized sensibility wants there seems to me to be no need to go all the way to Italy and complain it doesn't.

august77

Thank you very much for the updates. I did visit Venice and Rome and love whatever I ate. Looking forward to this year! Cheers to all