Bossi

Happy Valentine’s Day from Bossi, Tuscany, Italy <3

Our house in Bossi is in the middle of a vineyard. The featured picture above is our view across the street!

The stone house is gradually getting warmer. It was 54 outside yesterday afternoon, and so warm in the sun we were able to relax with a midday coffee in the courtyard. Our part of the house is the wooden door and adjacent glass door. Yesterday there was ice on the water in the top of the barrel, but today a darling little gray bird with orange on his neck was having cool drink of water. No one is staying in the rest of the house. The owner lives in Rome and messaged today to make sure we were good, apologize for the cold house, and give us more restaurant recommendations!

First on our agenda was getting a few groceries. Mike mapped out a store nearby that was supposedly open. Google maps struggles with all the road, hours, and buildings so when we got there it really wasn’t the store he was looking for. The map had redirected us to a city called Siena, where driving can be tricky. But we saw a store called Penny and stopped in. There was an excellent section of fresh pasta so Mike picked one out for dinner.

It was starting to warm up outside by the time we got home so we went for a walk down our road. Right by our house is a sign indicating you are leaving Bossi, and maybe a kilometer the other way you are leaving it, so it’s a very small area. It does include a winery which we hope to check out! If you go to google translate you can hear how Bossi is pronounced. They actually pronounce both S’s. Like Baus-see.

Outside our house there are gardens and using my handy plant identifier app I found we have rosemary, sage, onion, garlic, beets, leeks, and of course olives. The olive tree next to the house has dropped hundreds of black olives onto the stones with hundreds more still on the tree.

Yesterday was Monday so now the wine farmers were out in the fields. Everywhere you look. at the end of a row of grapes there are olive trees, and next to every olive grove there are rows of grapes. The soil is sort of gold colored and filled with rocks. In some areas, the hills are so sloped they have planted grapes, then taken the large stones and built a wall, then grapes, wall, grapes, wall like a terraced effect.

Small tractors wove in and out of the narrow lanes, some pulling like a rake to gather up last years’ vines, others pulling like a plow to turn the earth. One truck went by with huge bags with a chicken drawn on them; later we saw them using whatever was in the bags to fertilize the fields. In other fields we could see people on foot working, maybe ensuring the vines are properly attached to the wires. There are no visible green buds yet.

There were many pretty birds pipping around the vineyards and olive groves. Several magpies perched on the grapevines and then would fly off in a flash of black and white. We saw a large all white bird land in a field by some tractors and turns out it was a cattle egret, just like in Florida!

We had a bit of grocery confusion earlier and ended up without a couple things. The host had noted a nearby store in the guidebook so we headed out in another direction. Along our drive we saw stands of white trees, similar to birch trees in Michigan. These are gray birch.

When we got to the small town it was a good thing we couldn’t figure out where to park, because when we turned off the main road here is what we saw.

These vast green-yellow rolling hills went on as far as you could see, with immense villas perched atop many. This is spelt, according to my app, a wheat that apparently doesn’t mind the frost!

The host had given us a bottle of red wine from the region which we had with our spinach ricotta tortellini, along with a juicy flavorful orange. We sneaked out before moonrise and could see thousands of stars in the dry night Tuscan air.