Bologna and Ferrara:

On Friday night we took the train to Bologna to meet up with the rest of Justin's family.  We had dinner reservations at Dave's favorite restaurant in Italy, this little place called Da Fabio's.  It was preeeetty yummy! There are no menus, they just bring you a bunch of appetizers, then they read you the pasta and meat options and you order from there.  One of my favorite appetizers was a celery salad, which is sort of funny since I typically don’t like celery!  It was thinly sliced at an angle, tossed with a bit of lemon and olive oil and shaved pecorino cheese.  Now, since pecorino is one of my favorite cheeses, there is a good chance I would like anything that has pecorino on it.  Either way, it's definitely a recipe that I plan to re-create when we get home. 

The next day we did a little bit of walking around bologna before heading to pick up our rental cars.  We stopped in a few shops and drooled over the fruits and vegetables in the store fronts near our hotel.

Justin's parents rented a villa outside Montepulciano that we will stay in for a week.  On the way to Bologna we stopped in Ferrara for lunch.  Ferrara was a cute little fortress town, lots of narrow cobblestone streets. 

By the time we got to (or rather, FOUND) the villa, it was over an hour past check in.  It was dusk, the doors were locked and we had no cell service! We ended up piling back into the car and driving back to a pizza place we passed.  We borrowed their phone to call the villa owner to come let us in. Since it was rather late and we had no food for dinner, we ordered pizza to go and a few scraps of food that they happen to have at the counter.