Hotel Truciolini

Piazza Grande

by miedje

The Piazza Grande is the most famous square in town. It's surrounded by medieval-looking buildings. The strange thing is that is extremely sloping. But it's a beautiful place and that must be one of the reasons that parts of La vita è bella have been taped there.

Christmas Dinner in Arezzo

by edwis

"Christmas Dinner in a Enoteca"

Now it is late afternoon and we needed a good Christmas Day meal. We looked on the map we were using and saw that the closest town with the largest print size on the map was Arezzo. We never heard of it, but what the heck. What a nice little find this place it turned out to be. None of the tourist towers, castles or even a walled city, but just an old fashioned, historic downtown area with no cars allowed, and lots of people walking from 600-730 pm. Our choices were to eat at a Chinese place that was still open, or the enoteca (wine bar) we came upon which seemed to have a lot of activity going on.

We had a great time there sitting on the stools, eating and drinking with the locals. There were quite a mixture of old ladies, old men, some with butcher aprons still on, cute and stylish girls, some soccer team jocko types, and one Chinese mother and her daughter. Now joining this eclectic array, here we come as the two lost (goofy) Americans wandering in. This is where we learned the proper holiday greeting used is “Auguri”, or you can also use ‘Buone Feste’. Later after Christmas Day you use ‘Buon Anno’. Our very special Christmas meal (being the flexible folks we are) consisted of 2 pizza slices, 2 Panini with cheese, cucumbers, and tomatoes, 1 Focaccia, and the 5 glasses of wine which came from the opened bottles set out on the bar table. This was some special local red wine which they all were drinking, so we joined in. We go to settle up the bill, and all this came for only 18.50e. I was thinking that if Joan didn’t ‘lose it’ after having a Christmas meal like this, maybe that Prozac really does work…. (Tip: a good town to go back to for some everyday real Italian living)