A Drive from Florence to Tuscany

We rose to rain and storms in Florence as we prepared to leave the Lungarno Suites for a drive to Tuscany. Grabbing a hotel umbrella, I walked the 5 blocks from Ponte Vecchio to the EuropCar office just outside the city centre on the west side of Florence. It was an easy walk – but now I’m trying to figure out an easy way to drop the car off in 4 days and get the entire luggage to the train station.
EuropCar gave us a great Alfa Romeo – with just enough power to be dangerous.

After picking up the luggage at the hotel we headed through the streets from Florence – a lot of one way streets that dead-end into other one-way streets going the opposite way – to find the S2 highway through the hills of Tuscany, to Siena and our hotel: Borgo San Felice. The streets of Florence are small and crowded and the traffic signs are mostly non-existent. Where traffic signs do appear, there is a long column of signs pointing in all directions for places you can’t understand – and in the middle of the column there is one small sign telling you to take a hard left on the other side of the round-about.

Once we found S2, the drive was great. The highway connects Florence directly with Siena and then to Rome – and has few large trucks. It winds through the northern Tuscany country and stops, occasionally, in a medieval village that has been unchanged for 1,200 years. As we got closer to Siena, the road widened and there was more commercial traffic – and we found ourselves back to trying to decipher traffic signs.

We finally made it to the hotel – a beautiful hotel that is actually the original hamlet (Borgo) of San Felice, located in the center of the Chianti region. The hotel is owned by the company that produces San Felice wine and surrounding the hamlet are vines and olive trees that produce 17 different Chianti specialties under the San Felice brand. It is part of the Relais & Chateaux group of hotels and has wonderful views of the country-side.

Of course there’s a wine store and tasting room on the property – but we figured that we could save time, money and luggage space by buying the wine at Majestic in Addison when we got home. There is also a golf course, swimming pool and a Beauty Center on the property. The SPA specializes in Vinoterapia – Wine Therapy. I guess you bathe in the wine and then drink the rest of the case!

We had a wonderful dinner in the hotel – great Italian food and a piano player outside on the patio. Also at dinner was a group of people from around the world that gathered here to ride their bikes through the rolling Tuscan hills. I guess that’s a good way to stay in shape, but walking, eating and drinking can be just as grueling.

Tomorrow is a driving trip through southern Tuscany!