A crowd pleaser in Montepulciano

Weekly market in Montepulciano

My travels around Italy (In the guise of work) continued unabated for several years and I have been very fortunate to have travelled to every region except one - Valle D'Aosta. This time I was back in Tuscany to visit wineries around Montepulciano.



Church of San Biageo which lies below the town

Montepulciano is everything you want a small town in Italy to be: picturesque with views over valleys below and of course, good food and wine. I have now been to Montepulciano about 20 times and every time I go I find something I haven’t seen before.

My first experience of the town was thoroughly enjoyable though it had a touch of comedy to it as well. As usual I was on a bus with half a dozen other journalists and we were going to see Cantine Redi, a historical winery in the heart of Montepulciano.

The town hall and the main piazza

Now Montepulciano is a hilltop town, you have to go up a long and winding road to get to the town which levels out for 100 metres and then goes downhill again. The central piazza is bordered by the Town Hall (Municipio) a church and several other historical buildings. All the citizens live in apartments in the buildings, that could have been built up to 500 years ago, surrounding the piazza and also facing the valleys surrounding the town. The buildings are very attractive and you realise why the tourists love it so much (I kid myself that I am not a tourist as I am working.....).

Cantine Redi was situated part of the way down on the other side of town, the road basically the reverse of the way we had come in. We started downhill and the bus driver was being very careful as the road was only one lane, fortunately there wasn’t any other traffic coming the other way. We got down to a hairpin bend when some German tourists stepped out in front of us. Giulio the driver reacted as he was so shocked and he turned the wheel but he forgot to brake!

The bus ended up brushing a building opposite and losing traction as the road dipped and the road surface sloped away from the tyres on the bend. We were alright as this had all happened in slow motion. We all got off the bus to see how badly the bus was damaged.

Some of the people coming to have a look

Giulio was lucky because the bus had some paint scrapped off (it already had another couple of scrapes anyway)but that wasn’t our biggest problem, our biggest problem was the bus was stuck. Because the bus couldn’t get traction from the two wheels on the right hand side he couldn’t move it at all. People started to gather and hang out of windows, we became the afternoon’s entertainment. Several people gave Giulio suggestions of how to ‘unstick’ the bus as the crowd got larger and larger.

Checking to see we didn't leave a mark on the building

With most of the population of Montepulciano watching, Giulio tried to find a solution. A light bulb went on in his head and he rushed around the back of the bus and found a rope. He said if he tied it to the bumper bar at the back, we could all pull while he got the bus back on four wheels. After we had all stopped laughing, after all there were two women and a man in his seventies and the rest weren’t extremely fit, he realised that it might be a problem especially as all we would achieve would be to remove the bumper bar from the bus in an inappropriate manner.

The tow truck arrives

Someone in the crowd suggested calling the town’s tow truck and he thought that would be a good idea. So he called and we waited. The tow truck, because it belonged to the community, came in about five minutes. The young man got out and had a look at where we were stuck, went to the back of the tow truck and emerged with an older style car bench seat and stuck it under the tyre that had no traction. We thought he was equally as silly as Giulio but when Giulio got back in the bus he found he had traction again and was able to drive the bus several meters so that all four wheels were on the road again.

The tow truck river checking the traction of the wheels

There was a roar from the crowd and the tow truck driver took a bow. He then said for us to accompany him to the office as the tow of 800,000 lire ($800.00 ) had to be paid.

We're on the road again

Our guide Paola then started to panic, where was she going to get $800. She only had $100 on her so she phoned her office. We were all asked if we could contribute $100 and we would be reimbursed sometime over the next couple of days when we got to an ATM. Paola started collecting the money, apologising as she went. We arrived at the office about five minutes away downhill and disembarked. Giulio went in holding our money. We waited and waited, surely it couldn’t take that long to fill in a report and sign a receipt. At last Giulio emerged with a great big smile on his face and our money in his hands.

Waiting for the bill

When he had gone into the office he had been talking to the young tow truck driver. They discovered that Giulio’s boss was the young man’s previous employer and that he also had several mutual aquaintances – who would have known, it’s a small world. Because of this Giulio became an honorary resident and he only had to pay what a resident paid, 20,000 lire ($20). We left the office very quickly in case he changed his mind and made our way, very carefully this time, to Cantine Redi, which turned out to be a fantastic visit.

Next : A trip to Sicily turns sour