Italia!

While our trip to Italy was not a knitting trip, there's no getting away from fiber connections!  My husband and I traveled to Rome, Cinque Terre, Florence, the Chianti and Tuscan countryside, and returned home from Pisa.  Our focus was museums, sightseeing, and Italian food; there is so much to see and so much to eat!  Our favorite area was the Cinque Terre (Five Lands) which is a Unesco World Heritage Site.  We spent three nights in Manarola, one of the five villages in the Cinque Terre, and we hiked every day and enjoyed beautiful views of the Mediterranean, the charming little towns with their housing stacked up the steep hillsides, and vineyards galore.

But how about that fiber?  We were in Florence having a look at the Palazzo Vecchio when we happened upon the Sala del Cinquecento (Hall of the 500) which looked like it was being set up for some sort of fashion school exhibit - 50-60 elaborate costume pieces, each made from muslin.

Although we mostly traveled by train or other public transportation, when we left Florence we did rent a car for two days for a scenic drive through the curvy, hilly roads of Chianti and Tuscany.  We stopped in Siena and had a wonderful, casual lunch at Gino Cacino di Angelo, a little deli on Piazza Mercato, near the outdoor market.  Then we had a look in the Siena Duomo (cathedral).  We really liked the black and white striped columns and then fell in love with them even more when we found some sporting sheep's heads!

 

Of course we had to do a little window shopping while we were in Italy and that included looking at leather goods.  If these leather knit-look purses hadn't been just a little too small, I probably would have gotten one.