Hi all,
Wanted to share a trip report to Italy from our recent trip 9/24 to 10/2. We went to Montepucliano for 6 nights and 1 night in Rome before our flight home.
Before I go over the actual trip details, I’ll get the COVID related information out of the way first. Before our flight we took a PCR test on Wednesday and then an antigen test (rapid) on Friday, the day of our flight, so we knew for sure that we were negative. All the COVID paperwork was easy with United. We simply uploaded everything onto their app including the passenger locator form. We didn’t have to show any paperwork on our flight to Italy, since it was all on the app, but coming back to the US, we did have to show our vaccine cards and negative tests a few times (even though it was also on the app), a picture of the test paperwork on your phone was good enough. We also took 4 binax now tests through eMed (proctored test) with us, to test while we were there. These were very easy to do, took about a total of 25 minutes for the whole process to get the results. In Italy masks were required in all stores, museums, etc. we saw very little cloth masks as well, mostly surgical and KN95s. Also, there seemed to be capacity restrictions for indoor restaurants and stores. We only ate indoors twice but we felt safe since everyone needed a green pass or vaccine card. Overall we felt very safe in Italy because of the low case rate, our itinerary involved things outside and they were following precautions
Now to start our trip, we arrived in Rome around 8am and picked up our car rental through sixt. This was our 2nd time using them in Europe, we found them to be the cheapest option and never had a problem. We then drove to Montepulicano, which was about 2 hour 15 min drive. We stayed at Il Riccio with a room with a terrace. The room had a beautiful view of the valley and it was a great place to have breakfast in the morning. Almost all the restaurants we ate at here were from the RS book and they were all great. On this day we ate at Ai Quattro Venti right on the square. All restaurants have pici pasta, which is common in the area and delicious. The rest of the day we did the RS walk and just hung out around town. For dinner we ate at Osteria del Borgo which wasn’t in the RS book but had excellent food.
The next day we did the heart of Tuscany driving tour which was great to get familiar with the area. We first stopped in Pienza which was a very nice town. We then went to Monticchielo, which was a smaller beautiful hill town with hardly anyone there. We ate lunch at Ristorante Daria, which was delicious. We got the meat and cheese plate, raviolis and pici. Lastly we went to Bagno Vignoni which was a town with hot springs. For dinner this night we went to Osteria Del Conte, where we had the local soup, which was delicious.
The next day we went to Assisi. This forum persuaded us to go here instead of Cortona and it was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. According to RS it sounds like it is usually jam packed with tourists but when we went it was empty. It was a beautiful town to explore. We followed the RS walk in Assisi. We ate at Trattoria Degli Umbri on the square which was good. We got their speciality pasta with lemon and juniper and vegetable cheese pasta which were both unique and delicious. For dinner we ate at La Pentolaccia in Montepulciano. For appetizer we had shredded zucchini with truffle and shredded Parmesan and the other appetizer was a vegetable roll in a puff pastry with tomato sauce. It was a different appetizer than usual but very good. A popular dish in the area is rosemary steak, which we got there, it was good. Continued…