Day 17 - Carpaneto to Castell’Arquato - Wednesday July 1, 2015

Got an excellent sleep after abandoning the bed bug bag. The place was perfectly quiet, except for some barking dogs, which mainly only barked when we were awake anyway, presumably at people walking past their property. We know all about that, since we get barked at a lot.

The general manager, Vanessa, was nowhere to be seen when we got to breakfast, so I went back to our room to make coffee, but she showed up right away  and Russell came to the window of our room and told me she was making cappuccino. A lovely breakfast. She is from Mordovia, so Russian is her mother tongue. Very pretty young lady, and an absolutely beautiful hotel in the middle of nothing but field upon field of roma tomatoes. Makes you wonder.

We had walked down a tree lined road getting to the hotel, and left through the woods. Soon the woods opened up to acres of roma tomatoes. The tomatoes we had for supper last night have to have been the sweetest tomatoes and best tomatoes I’ve ever had.

The view in the distance of the hills and valleys is magnificent. 

We climbed some major hills today, two of which went on for a kilometer each, in total 120 meters ascent. We were walking through vineyards, past some magnificent houses. We then went through the ancient part of Castell’Arquato, with the medieval Palazzo Pretoria, the superb Collegiata di Santa Maria Assunta (12^th century), and the tower of the Rocca Viscontea. 

There was an art exhibit in what was an old monastery, and we went in and viewed the art. Five different artists were displaying their works. Two sculptors, one doing various interpretations of the stations of the cross in olive wood, and the other very graceful sculptures of women. The three others were painters. Very interesting work. Major descent into the newer part of town, through a vault, and on to our hotel.

It was a gorgeous 15.5 km walk today, and my feet behaved very well.

I called our Macs Adventure Italian Viadelsole representative yesterday, because Russell noticed that our hotel voucher for today had the wrong name on it. Starting yesterday, and for three nights they had revised our itinerary and hotels. Beppe was very pleased I had called him. He assured me the hotel knew we were coming, and it was just a little mistake he had made. He asked how we were enjoying the via Francigena and I said we were very pleased except we were often having difficulty finding our accommodations because the route notes didn’t tell us how to get there. He didn’t really want to admit to any short coming in the route notes. He said he would like to meet with us in Sienna, if that was okay with us, to talk about any improvements they could make. That is where their offices are. I said sure, we would like that.

Our hotel in Castell’Arquato, the Hotel Leon D’Oro was very nice. Beppe said we were lucky to be staying there. Russell and I both agreed that the dinner there was the best we had had so far. We had tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and bread for an appetizer, handmade tortellini stuffed with ricotta and spinach, and then I had grilled beef in a marinade with potatoes, and Russell had sea bass with vegetables, followed by a lemon sorbet. Absolutely delicious. We also had a bottle of local Gutturnio wine, which was a frizzante red, but nothing like Baby Duck! This was a full bodied red wine, which was frizzante. Very nice. This time we selected the wine from a wine menu, and knew how much it was going to cost in advance. It was very reasonable.

Although it was a very nice hotel, the air conditioner didn’t work well. It might have simply been that it was so hot, the air conditioner didn’t have enough power to keep up. Anyway, I didn’t sleep well, got a headache, and finally opened the windows. The room was very hot!