And so the road trip continues...

Trip Start Jun 17, 2007
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Trip End Aug 01, 2007


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Flag of Italy  ,
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

First thing on Wednesday morning, we checked out of our rooms in Santa Maria degli Angeli (or Santa Maria de who-sy-whatsit as I called it) and took the bus up the hill to Assisi to visit San Francesco cathedral.  There's quite an impressive view of it from the bottom of the hill.  It was built in honour of St Francis of Assisi.  Strangely enough, there was nothing in Assisi or even in our Lonely Planet book that told us that St Francis is the patron saint of animals and also of Italy - we found out in Siena and through Google!!  Anyway, the cathedral is actually made up of two cathedrals, an upper and a lower one.  The upper one has a series of paintings on its walls with scenes from St Francis' life, including an apparently famous one of him preaching to some birds (of the feathered, rather than female variety!).

Afterwards, we set off for Montepulciano, famous for its red wine.  After a bit of driving, we finally found our hotel, Hotel Panoramic, which was a little way out of town...Wasn't the greatest hotel in the world, the rooms were dark, and service wasn't particularly great.  What was great though, was the fact that it had a swimming pool.  So after a quick stop at the supermarket for supplies, we got into our togs (swimming costumes/bathers for you non-Kiwis out there) and had a bottle of wine with crostinis (basil pesto, salami and cheese).  Yum!!  Very pleasant way to spend the afternoon.  As a result, we weren't hungry until later on - we went into the main part of town and wandered around a bit but had to wander around quite a lot before we found a restaurant whose kitchen was still open at 9.30pm.  Bit surprising for Italy...Anyway, ended up having homemade pasta for dinner which was quite tasty, before heading back to our hotel for the night.
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