It's the Little Things That Matter: Same morning, more exploring...

Next, I went back through the villa itself to the lawn and the wine terrace. The quick tour Lucia gave us when we checked in the previous evening was a bit of a blur, so I had to retrace my steps a bit. From our front door I had to go back up to the parking area and in the door of the villa. There's a great old kitchen area (is this the Fattoria?) with a big walk-in fireplace area and information on sightseeing in the area and a menu posted of the meals for the next week. If you come here on a program you eat with the group every night. If you come as a tourist as we did, you have to sign up for the meals, which we did for the first and last nights of our stay. Given what we were doing, it made more sense to be on our own for meals- and anyway, we had a great time cooking dinners together with all the yummy stuff from our harvest basket! But after getting a taste of the cameraderie the night before I think that if (WHEN) I come back here someday, I may want to eat with the whole group!

From the Fattoria there is a long hallway that connects to another, perpendicular to the first one. The walls are solid stone, and you can just feel how old this place is! You can also tell that these two hallways and their accompanying parts of the building were built at different times.

From this second hallway, turning right from the Fattoria, there is a door at the far end that opens up onto the lawn. This is the door directly below the tower in the photo above. To the left, however are the dining rooms and enormous kitchen. If you make your way through this way you will find yourself on the wine terrace!

This is the view out when you first step out onto the lawn.

If you walk up to the site wall -there are a couple little passages through the hedge- you look down on the absolutely gorgeous garden of Spannocchia!

This is where the contents of our harvest basket and bouquet came from. Everything is so beautifully meticulous.

If you look just beyond the site wall behind the garden, that's where I was wandering before; the chickens and blackwater pond are behind the big tree to the left.

On the front face of the wall (facing the garden, not the lawn) were all these climbing plants with really pretty flowers- these are caper bushes! I'd always wondered what capers looked like before they were in a jar or on pizza! :) They were cool to look at- like a vertical garden!

If you look to the right of the overall photo at the top of this post you'll see these potted lemon trees. This is a traditional Tuscan thing to do: the climate is too cold for them to survive year-round. So they plant lemon trees in big pots like this. In the winter time they move them indoors, into a sort of greenhouse for lemon trees. I don't remember the name anymore, but it is to the left of these trees, just out of the picture. When we were there this greenhouse was used as an artists' studio, specifically for the printmaking class!

The lawn is very long and narrow, and continues on to the right of the photo above, tapering as a constructed panorama to the entrance gate we first saw when we drove up the hill the night before. (we continued around to the right along the tall stone wall.) This is the view from just inside that gate, looking back over the lawn to the villa, the wine terrace, and everything else.

Here's another view, from a bit closer in. You can see the lemon greenhouse in the background.

The scrubby light green shrubs at the corners of the villa are prickly pears- they've got tons of them here! Directly below the tower in this shot is a little courtyard that is used in nice weather as another dining room.