Nine free nights in late April was enough to book a somewhat last minute trip to Italy with a favorite traveling companion, before the weather steamed up and the crowds descended. We’ve traveled to Italy together before, but she had never visited Tuscany, and I’ve been enough times to have no checklist of must-dos.
Flew direct on Delta from ATL to Rome, then jumped on a quick ITA flight to Firenze. Picked up our car arranged by my long-time go-to gemut.com and hit the road, destination Siena. I plugged an address into the Navi, and calendar-worthy scenery started rolling by almost as soon as we cleared the airport. It was a joyride under the Tuscan sun, even as I realized we must have circled and long passed Siena. We were booked at a B&B about 10 km outside Siena, and Navi continued feeding us directions, so we kept driving. (If we hadn’t been so mesmerized by the scenery, we probably would have realized we had long since overshot the 65 km from the airport to the B&B!)
Finally, the Navi drove us to a lovely country B&B, somewhere in Tuscany, just not in Siena and not ours! The very kind owner insisted on making us cappuccinos while we reconfigured the correct route to our B&B Palazzo Merse still an HOUR away! https://www.palazzomerse.it
Palazzo Merse, Sovicille
I’m writing this TR mainly as a shout-out to this amazing B&B, technically in the tiny hamlet of Sovicille. It was originally an 18th century building housing the mill workers. Today it houses two lovely sisters and their families, Nona (who cooks lunch every day for her entire family), and five pristine guest apartments. We had the spacious loft apartment, with a kitchen, a downstairs seating area with a contemporary gas fireplace, and French doors opening to the garden. The sofa is a sleeper, but they offered to put a comfortable single bed in the area behind the sofa to give us each our own sleeping space.
Breakfast was always wonderful: fresh bakery items, fruit and cheeses, perfect avocados, eggs cooked to order, and more. On a day the bakery was closed, Federica made us tiramisu, which we liked so much she made us the strawberry version the next morning. For dinner they sent us to delightful local restaurants in even tinier hamlets and to Hosteria il Carroccio in Siena for remarkable Bistecca alla Fiorentina. We requested a smallish one, approved the raw cut they brought out on a platter, then demolished the kilo+ of Chianina beef, grilled slightly past mooing - just as we like it!
Margherita our host was never farther than a quick WhatsApp call away when we were lost, needing a dinner reservation, or wanting reassurance that I really wasn’t invading the ZTL if I parked in Siena’s Il Campo lot! Having a friend/contact like this makes independent travel even easier. Our B&B was ideally situated for Tuscan road trips and we had six nights and six unhurried days to enjoy them. (You won't believe the low price for all this happiness!)