Dreamscapes Travel & Lifestyle Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dreamscapes.ca/i/679293
assortment of vintage tiles and crown mouldings, salvaged artwork and antique bric-à-brac from the estate sales of Tuscan palazzos. Upstairs, at the Desinare cooking school written up in Vanity Fair, I learn how to pinch fresh pasta into raviolis stuffed with walnut and ricotta, and eat my lesson for lunch. Soon, Fattori arrives to continue our energized golf-cart tour. We pass the Pitti Palace of the Medici family (bankers and de facto rulers of the city for centuries) and weave through back alleys no tour bus could fit into, ever higher, toward the panoramic lookouts of Piazzale Michelangelo and then Abbazia di San Miniato al Monte. Palazzo Vecchio's turreted medieval clock tower, and the unmistakable dome (Il Duomo) of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, puncture the low-slung silhouette of the city, and eventually, Florence disap- pears into the hilly Tuscan countryside, my next destination. COUNTRYSIDE PLEASURES Wine country is an easy daytrip a little more than an hour away from Florence, and I love the contrast of urban and rural perspectives I get by stepping away from a city to com- pare it to nearby geographies. Marquis Piero Antinori's winery is a curved terra-cotta slab set into 4.5 hectares of neatly braided vines. Unlike the area's tra- ditional-looking villas and farms, this is smooth, modernist architecture, and very precise—the cellar alone is lined with 130,000 tiles that took seven years to lay without mortar. And it's a mighty operation processing grapes from two of the family's 14 estates around Italy that go into making some 120 labels of wine. I taste a few Chianti Classicos, a prelude to dinner at Osteria di Passignano, a Michelin-starred restaurant in one of umpteen villages nearby. The restaurant occupies the ground floor of a monastery surrounded by vineyards in every direction and it's all owned by the Antinoris. Allegra Antinori, one of Piero's three daughters, plays host for the dinner. Between courses of veal and pasta, we sip Badia A Passignanco Gran Selezione 2010, and I think about the time the Antinoris have had to get their technique just right. They've been winemakers for 26 genera- tions dating back to 1385. Throughout the evening, Allegra whispers to staff to make little improvements to our meal: "Heat this more. Serve that wine next." "If I'm out with friends at their place, I enjoy myself immensely," she laughs, "but if it's one of my restaurants, I'm the worst critic." The next morning, I take a walk in the woods with a mutt named Giotto, some- DREAMSCAPES SPRING/SUMMER 2016 54 RIGHT: Somewhere between Florence and Pisa—exactly where is a secret—the Savini family's truffle-hunting dog, Giotto, noses into a tree. Sarah Staples BELOW CENTRE: Views of the Arno and Ponte Vecchio come standard at Portrait Firenze, one of four properties owned by the Ferragamo family in their Lungarno Collection situated on the river, in the UNESCO heritage downtown district of Florence. Lungarno Collection BELOW BOTTOM: Cordon Bleu-trained chefs help tourists pinch pasta into raviolis at Desinare. Sarah Staples