Italian Traveller: A crowd pleaser in Montepulciano

Italian Traveller: 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 ve...

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

A little Mafioso gets in trouble

The Coast Road

Our trip to Calabria was planned for October when the weather was supposed to be slightly cooler, but it turned out to be an ‘indian summer’ with long hot days. It was great if you intended to visit one of the beachside resorts for which Calabria is famous but not for visiting vineyards.

We were in the vineyards of Nicodemi Librandi and we were melting. Our interest was starting to wane, we were being shown gaglioppo vines and there wasn’t a cloud in the blue, blue sky. Our host, sensing our lack of attention said we would go into the winery and you could feel everyone's relief. The difference between the hot vineyards and the cool winery was fantastic and we soon got our concentration back.

Nicodemi Librandi

Librandi was a lovely host and a few years later I had a chance to meet him again and this time I was on my own. He took me for lunch at a restaurant called Ficcadindia. When we had finished lunch he asked me if I wanted dolce (dessert). It was another hot day so I declined but then I spotted a waiter walking past with watermelon that looked really refreshing and I asked whether I could have some. At the time, I only spoke my family's small town dialect as I hadn’t learnt to speak ‘real’ Italian ,so I asked for ‘zupangolo’ - watermelon. He roared with laughter and said he hadn’t heard it called that for 30 years. It was now commonly known as anguria and where was my family from that they still used this old dialect. Needless to say I started studying proper Italian when I got home.

On this trip we also  visited the wineries of Lento and Statti, both of which were interesting and well run. At Statti we met some of the workers, a bunch of happy ladies who allowed us to take photos of them. The winery also had a menagerie of farm animals and one of the Statti brothers picked out one donkey who wouldn't stop braying and he said they even had their own politician pointing at the donkey.

The house at Fattoria San Francesco

We were staying at the agriturismo of San Francesco, a fairly modern winery situated on the land of a former abbey. The agriturismo had actually been redeveloped from the cloisters of the abbey. There was also a very picturesque house on the property where I stayed along with the only other female journalist. Everywhere we went in Italy we were always given separate accommodation - I don’t know why. Would we get up to naughty things at night if we shared the accommodation with men?

The winery was built on a plateau half way up a hill and had spectacular views all the way to the sea. It was one of the most beautiful places I had seen in Calabria, unfortunately the town nearby wasn’t so beautiful. It was under the control of a local mafia. On the morning after our arrival I went for an early morning walk, I hadn’t said anything to anybody and I spent about an hour before breakfast investigating the area. I walked up to the town further up the hill and discovered a place where everything was grey, even the people who were out and about that early. It was depressing, no one smiled, the people looked old before their time and I am not exaggerating when I say the monotone colour of the place was off-putting. It was very depressing.

I decided to go back to the winery and have breakfast and started making my way back down the hill. I spotted some stairs going downhill so I decided to go that way. The staircase took me down to a children’s playground. Everything in the playground was brand new - new swings, a roundabout, several climbing toys and two street lamps. The two street lamps were smashed and around the equipment there was a carpet of smashed glass - so much that I could tell this wasn’t the work of kids. It had been put there on purpose.

A church in the town of Ciro Marina

I made my way back to the winery quite unsettled by the devastation and why had no one cleared up the mess. At the winery there were people running around and calling my name. As I approached, Phillip our guide, came up to me and asked me was I alright. I answered yes and why had everyone been running around and calling my name. I was told I wasn’t to go out on my own again for my own safety, there had been a number of kidnappings in the past year and I would be safer if I stayed with the group. After hearing that I had no problem staying with the group.

After everything had calmed down we had breakfast. I asked about the playground.  The housekeeper then told me something very sobering, the local mafia had placed the glass there and had given warnings that anyone who removed it would be dealt with - how, I don’t know but I understand why they didn’t.

Apparently the local mayor had applied for and received money from Rome to build the playground. The local mafia don had waited for his normal cut of the money and was disappointed when he received nothing so he had some men break hundreds of bottles the night before the playground was officially opened and warnings were sent around by word of mouth. I felt very sad for the people in the town - I won’t mention the name of the town, you can find it easily enough if you look for the winery.

A second incident occurred involving the local mafia when a visit to a winery (which I won’t name) was cancelled. We were waiting one afternoon for someone to come from the winery to show us how to get there. A car with two men came down the driveway very slowly. The two men had a look at us waiting and then turned around and took off. We all looked at one another and said “what was that about?” Five minutes later the car came back and did the same thing. When Phillip approached the car to ask if it was looking for us, it took off. A couple of minutes later Fattoria San Francesco received a call that the visit was called off.

Phillip was very angry and called the winery back, after five minutes he managed to convince them that we were indeed journalists and we were intending to visit the winery whether they wanted us or not. They agreed and said they would come back and lead us to the winery. At this stage we weren’t so sure we wanted to go anymore, there was obviously something going on and would we end up being caught up in it?

A few minutes later the car with the two men returned and we all piled in the minibus and off we went. We followed the car to a vineyard that was close to the ocean and we were told to wait. Another car soon arrived and a young man got out, he was wearing sunglasses which seemed a bit strange as it was getting dark.  He was dressed all in black and looked like a character for a poster for a gangster movie.

The Saracen market at sunset

It turned out he was the son of the owner and he spoke English well enough to talk to us. He showed us the vineyards and talked about the grapes and the thousands of Indian Figs that dotted the surrounding area but no mention of the winery or offer to take us there was given, instead we were told to get back on the minibus and we were going to have dinner at a lovely resort a short distance away.

Sure enough, a couple of kilometres down the road was a restaurant - I would hardly call it a resort - and we all got out of the minibus. We went in and met the owner, then we were shown to a table outside and the young man from the winery sat down at the table first, making sure he was able to get away fast and had a clear view of anyone entering the restaurant. It was quite chilly but obviously he wanted to make sure no one could sneak up on us. We felt uncomfortable because his companions didn’t sit down, instead they prowled around. It was the fastest meal I had ever eaten and we were soon on our way back to Fattoria San Francesco.

The next day we discovered through some other people that the young man had been beaten up - hence the glasses - and the winery was a mess.  Personally I was glad to get out of Calabria although my two sisters-in-law go back occasionally for holidays. There are some lovely spots, beautiful resorts and beaches but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about returning anytime soon!

Next: We have fun in Montepulciano