Familytime in Tuscany

After the NL party it was on to holiday in Tuscany. It’s a hard, hard life I lead. Flew into Pisa and quickly fixed up some legacy engineering issues.

Actually, the tower area is really cool, you can wander about for free which is quite nice. Of particular interest is the baptistery. Acoustically perfect, every 30 minutes a security guard comes in and sings a few notes cleverly calculated to achieve harmonics as they interfere with each other. Anyway, it’s hard to describe, just make sure if you’re ever in Pisa that you go to the baptistery, it’s free to go in if you’re praying.. Here’s a recording (not mine) – scroll to 1 minute 20 seconds..

After you’ve been into the baptistery, you can then go (not free) into the Cemetery. It has a statue of Fibonacci there, and the most horrific hell scene I’ve ever seen. Seriously graphic.

From Pisa we drove to Barbarino Val D’elsa, a small village in Tuscany. My sister had picked out the place, and it really was superb. A “Palazzetto” (small palace) it was basically 4 houses combined into one. Massive. Liz had even worked out that the house would have the most killer view out over the countryside (something stupidly left out of the literature for the house… it would have been a main selling point if I was marketing it!)

Anyway, a week of exploring Tuscany, discovering the delights of “Vin santo and Cantuccini” (almond biscuity thingies dipped in a sort of desert wine), exploring Florence (Galileo museum and Uffizi), eating tonnes of ice-cream, finding a skeleton in a church and a wine tour (Chianti region)

Oh, one final thing was the sculpture garden. I really enjoyed this one – called “Energy”