Details, accommodations

Staying in Italy for three months presented us with quite a challenge. On the one hand we were fortunate to be staying in one place, in this case in Siena for 8 weeks, but that meant it would be doubly difficult to find a place we could call home and yet not pay the normal tourist rate.

While there are a great many rentals generally available for the tourist in the Siena area – it is after all on the very edge of Chianti – the cost for two months of a modest apartment would have been astronomical. We were not privy to the local classifieds, and we did not attempt to go through a local broker. Even brokers in the US were unable (or unwilling) to help us find a place to fit our needs at a discounted cost for such a long rental period. So, given our limitations both in language and units available in the area we quickly became aware of the hurdles facing us in our search.

Although the language school we would be attending is located inside the city walls and not far from the Piazza del Campo, we ruled out staying inside the "centro storico”, the historical center, since few long-term rentals were available to us and what we did find were very expensive.

In 1999 Sue and I took a 2-week language course in Siena (from the same school which we will be attending this winter and spring) and stayed in a wonderful apartment just a short bus ride from the city center. The name of the complex is Le Meridiane and we had such a wonderful time that I have actually recommended this place at least once on my Siena website. So we contacted Le Meridiane last summer and eventually negotiated a discounted price for our 8-weeks stay, as it turns out in the very same apartment we stayed in back in 1999: 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, a small but nice kitchen (none of the units have ovens) and a wonderful little terrace – great for doing homework and sipping wine in the afternoon, assuming the weather cooperates. They have ample parking and a bus stop not 100 mts from the apartment.

But Siena only accounts for slightly more than two-thirds of our trip, from February 18 to April 16. What’s next?

After school we head south for sunny Sicily! We hope to stay somewhere south of Naples for one night before continuing on to the small town of Villa San Giovanni, just north of Reggio di Calabria, where we will take the short ferry across the Straits of Messina to Sicily. From there we drive west to the other side of the island, to our apartment near Scopello, west of Palermo on the Golfo di Castellammare. We found this place online at Authentic Sicily, run by Gary Portuesi who lives in New York but still has family contacts in Sicily, which he puts to good use. We will be in Scopello from April 17 until April 24.

After a week spent in the sun we head back across the Straits of Messina and have several days to linger on our drive to northern Italy. On April 27 we check into our apartment at an agriturismo (working farm which rents out rooms and/or apartments) called Le Sorgive near Solferino, just south of Lake Garda and a bit west of Verona, just inside of Lombardia across from the Veneto. We found this particular rental in Karen Brown’s guide to B & Bs, like Rick Steves one of the more reliable guidebooks for places to stay in Italy. After a week at Le Sorgive we leave on May 4 head to Lake Orta, located northwest of Milan and just west of Lake Maggiore (where we stayed in September of 2001) for our final two nights of relxation and contemplation at the Hotel Villa Crespi in Orto San Giulio before catching a Delta flight out of Milan on May 6.

But I really don’t want to talk about leaving Italy.