travelogue ~ pietrasanta, italy.

We are very lucky that Ben's parents wanted to do this trip, and they basically left the planning and details to me and Ben. So, over the last couple of months, we planned out an itinerary including restaurants and our day trips and activities. This also included finding a villa that we rented in Pietrasanta for the week. It was glorious. The Villa was perched up above the sea (way up above - the drive up was 25 minutes of switch-backs!) and the views were just amazing. So, based on pictures alone, we were very excited to make the drive from Rome to Pietrasanta.

The drive from Rome was about 4 hours, so we decided to break it up with a full 3-course meal about mid-way. And as it turned out, this meal was one of our best of the trip. We had made a reservation at Osteria del Merlo in Cetona (just outside Siena) and the restaurant did not disappoint. We actually ended up being about 2 hours late for our reservation (because of a tense and complicated morning leaving Rome!) but it was not a problem. The food and service were phenomenal. The rabbit ragu pasta that we had was, in my opinion, the best pasta dish of the trip. And the desserts (not pictured) were out of this world. We also ended up buying some wine from them and after having commented on the jams they served with cheese - the owners (perfectly italian and only italian speaking) ended up gifting us two jars! It was just an amazing meal and we would highly recommend it.

Extremely full - we worked ourselves back into the car and onward to the Villa and the pictures online had not done justice to what a great place it is!

We met the owners, dropped our bags, did a quick-change and headed out for dinner. For dinner, we wanted to stay relatively close and so we headed to Locanda di Bruno in the hills by Pietrasanta. Tucked into a small little town, it is a lovely restaurant - and they have particularly good fish dishes.

Over the course of the week, we made day-trips to Cinque Terre, Siena, Lucca and Florence but we also thoroughly enjoyed the villa. This included pool time...

And for two of the nights, we scheduled a chef to come to the house and cook dinner for everyone. This turned out to be a really nice addition to the itinerary since the 20 minute drive up and down from the house at times felt long and that way we could enjoy the views and relax.

Still more to come...stay tuned!