Six days between Florence, Siena and the hills of Val d Orcia, all from one base.
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Tuscany can be crossed in three days and leave you with nothing. We chose the opposite: five nights in one place, at a family farmhouse near Certaldo, twenty minutes from the motorway and eight kilometres from the nearest supermarket. You unpack once. Every morning we leave at half past eight, and in the evening you come back to a terrace where the long table is already set.
The first big day belongs to Florence. Our Uffizi tickets are booked for 9:15, so you skip the queue that in summer stretches across the whole square. The afternoon is free and most of the group ends up on Ponte Vecchio and later at Piazzale Michelangelo for sunset. Siena is a different animal. Smaller, darker, medieval down to the last stone. On Piazza del Campo we sit on the paving like everyone else while our guide Katarína explains why horses race between spectators there twice a year.
Two afternoons are spent with winemakers. The first, Alessandro near Panzano, has been making Chianti Classico for thirty years and runs the tasting in a cellar kept at 14 degrees, so bring a sweater even in July. The second day we drive to Montalcino for Brunello. The tasting comes with lunch, not instead of it. The coach ride from Slovakia is long, roughly fourteen hours, which is why we leave on Thursday evening and you sleep through most of it. We are back early on Wednesday. The group is sixteen people at most, so nobody gets lost in the lanes and restaurants seat us at one table. We have run this tour eleven times in four years and reshaped it around what people said was missing. That is why Florence has a free afternoon and why we skip the museum in Siena. Nobody wanted it.
We meet at 18:30 by the bus station in Turzovka, with pickups in Žilina, Trenčín and Bratislava. The route runs through Austria and Slovenia with two longer stops for coffee and stretching. The coach has blankets and pillows and the seats recline. You sleep on the way.
We have breakfast already in Tuscany. First stop is San Gimignano with its fifteen surviving towers, which we cover in two hours including a gelato on Piazza della Cisterna from a shop that has twice won the world championship. Check in follows in the afternoon, with the first shared dinner at seven.
We leave at 8:15, park near the station and continue on foot. The Uffizi slot is 9:15 and the visit takes two and a half hours. Then the Duomo, the Baptistery and Ponte Vecchio. From two you are free until 18:30. Katarína will point you to three trattorias where lunch costs under fifteen euros.
A slow day. We drive the SS222 through the Chianti hills and stop for photographs above Greve. At eleven we are at Alessandro cellar for a tour and a tasting of four wines with olive oil and pecorino. The afternoon covers Greve in Chianti and we are back by five, with the rest of the day by the pool.
The morning is Siena: the cathedral with its inlaid marble floor and Piazza del Campo. After lunch we cross the Val d Orcia, stopping at the Vitaleta chapel and at the row of cypresses you know from calendars. The last stop is Montalcino, where a Brunello tasting comes with a late lunch at the Bartoli family estate.
After breakfast we pack and drive to Pisa. The leaning tower, the Baptistery and an hour for lunch. At one we set off home via Milan and Austria. We reach Turzovka around three in the morning, and we will give you a tighter estimate the day before based on traffic.
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