Zeb and Bagno Vignoni

Sunday, I ate at a little gem of a restaurant called Zeb on the way up to Piazzela Michelangelo.  The house specialty was ravioli stuffed with ricotta and pear in a pear sauce and we also ate an eggplant dish stuffed with smoked mozzarella that just melted in our mouths.

  We walked up to San Mineato and took some pictures of the statue in the graveyard.  Dawn, a film maker, is filming a documentary of Firenze, so we shot some footage.  Above is an ancient fresco painted when the church was built, around the 10th century.
     Yesterday, I rented a car with Monika and we drove to Bagno Vignoni.  Getting out of Florence was very tricky, even on a Sunday morning with a GPS system and Monika to navigate, but we did it and drove through the hills of Tuscany, 2 hours south of Florence.  Bagno Vignoni is an old Roman town built around a hot spring.  You can still see it in the middle of the town, but apparently, you can't go in the springs, you have to go to one of the spas in the few hotels surrounding it.
We booked a day pass at the Albergo di Terme which has a mineral water sauna, a hot mineral bath with waterfalls and a warm mineral bath with jet streams.    It's a good thing we were inside because it was pouring rain.  We padded around in a robe and flip-flops, drank herbal tea and ate something in the so-so restaurant.  After, I walked around the tiny town to check out another spa for future reference, visited an herbal store and a bookstore.  The sun reappeared as we made our way back to Florence. 

Nicole had just flown in from Amsterdam, so I met her back at the apartment.