Villa Gamberaia & Villa Collodi (The Home of Pinocchio.) & Andrea Bocelli!

We left Florence today after three exhausting days of climbing villa stairs, walking city streets, and examining numerous marble statues. While we enjoyed the city we are excited to spend more time in the countryside away from the crowds.

Our adventures began today in the town of Settignano. Here we visited and explored Villa Gamberaia. Gamberaia makes excellent use of the regional topography by terracing multiple areas and creating rooms with hedges. Numerous parterres and topiaries accent the garden. The main color found on the property is the roses, orange trees, lemon trees and the occasional wisteria. Like most Tuscan villas, the overlook is afforded panoramic valleys and fields of olive trees.

After some drive time we visited the town of Collodi which is the home of Pinocchio! The town truly takes pride in this as there are shops with hundreds of puppets and toys. Our villa for this town was Villa Garzoni. Here we found a long bowling green, grotto, a bamboo forest, multiple fountains, and a butterfly house. One of the more pleasing design elements of this villa was its smart use of terracing and stairs to move the person up the steep hill to the fountains.

We are spending the evening sea side in the town of Forte dei Marmi. As a few of us were walking this evening we had Andrea Bocelli ride by us on a bicycle! It was crazy! The woman riding next to him simply had one hand on his sholder. And on that note I will end this posting.

Ciao!