As we’re just bumming around here in northern Italy, we found a place just outside of Montepulciano available for three nights. What do we know about Montepulciano? A Tuscan hill town 80 miles south of Florence, known in particular for its wine. We loved it. Or, to be more precise, I loved it. Really loved it. A true fantasy. Mark liked it.

This was an unusual stop in one big way. Instead of staying in the town, or the center of the city, as we typically do, we stayed a couple miles outside of town. Villa Poggiano is a small boutique hotel on fabulous grounds out on a small dirt road. The town of Montepulciano is just a couple of miles away, but it’s as though you were in a different – quiet – world. That distance is a big part of why I loved it and why Mark only liked it. You see, to get into town for lunch or dinner, you had to get in your car and drive. And since the car was in his name, he had to do all the driving.

For me, though, it was heaven. My morning runs were out on a dirt road through rolling hills in the Val d’Orcia, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, celebrated for “an exceptional reflection of the way the landscape was re-written in Renaissance times to reflect the ideals of good governance and to create aesthetically pleasing pictures.” If you went out for an afternoon walk you could smell the hay, hear the tractors, and see the countryside for miles and miles. If you just wanted to sit around and do nothing? There was plenty of shade and the grounds of our hotel were simply stunning. Some highlights:

The hotel and grounds themselves were a huge highlight. We had a drop-dead gorgeous view of Tuscany from our bedroom, and outside there were grand trees, a beautiful pool, and quiet places to read or drink grappa. Villa Poggiano was pretty darned good, one of my favorite places in a long time.

A couple times a year our hotel hosts a classical concert, and we just happened to be there on one of those nights. There were five young-ish opera singers, all women, doing a Master Class with some famous singer in Montepulciano, so they came and did a short concert for us. The singers were all pretty great, though of course there were a couple I liked better than the others. But a free concert (outsider had to pay like €2.00, but if you were staying there it was free)? Can’t beat it.

Mark in the very cute and very small town of Monticchiello

Old graduate school classmates of ours have a house maybe an hour southwest from Montepulciano in Paciano, a tiny old Umbrian hill town. It’s a place they plan to spend half their retirement, so we went for a visit. Sarah was away, but Erik showed us their old farmhouse, olive orchard, Paciano, and the neighboring Panicale. Both cute little towns and fun to see life as it’s lived by the (ex-pat) locals.

And then the big, big excursion was an eight-mile hike out the dirt road behind our hotel. First we went to Monticchiello, a beautiful little town with classic Tuscan walls, gates, and architecture. Then we continued overland to Pienza, yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site, in this case as the first place where Renaissance town-planning concepts were established when Pope Pius II decided to transform the look of his home town. And then back. All this, walking on little dirt roads with world-class views. It doesn’t get much better.

Oh yeah, and the wine. Montepulciano wines are supposed to be among the best in Italy, and that was certainly our impression.

We didn’t spend much time in the town of Montepulciano itself. We’d go in for lunch or dinner but then really just head back. One of the amusing things to observe is that the town appears to be one of those places that is really on the American travel circuit. We often observe that unless you’re in Paris or Barcelona or Prague you just don’t hear many Americans. Apparently Montepulciano has been discovered, though, because there were Americans everywhere.

OK, so I got my three days of rural heaven. From here we head into Siena and then on to Florence. We expect there’ll be no shortage of tourists there.

I loved the views on our walks around Montepulciano and Pienza

The town of Pienza from our stroll through the Tuscan hillside

Monticchiello was really small, yet still it had an outdoor art exhibit of this family made of wire. It was surprisingly cool.

And then there was this…

A view of Monticchiello on our way to Pienza. And yes, to get there we walked up that hill, then back down into the valley, before walking back up into Pienza. It was definitely worth it.

Inside Pienza the Cathedral and surrounding palaces were among the earliest Renaissance-style buildings

The view out of Monticchiello from one of the town’s original gates

Mark on the walk, with Pienza behind him

Lunch in Panicale with Erik was very much a small-town event. And every bit as you might expect in small town Italy.

And finally, you think the U.S. is the only place with waves of amber grain? They grow a lot of food here.

From Castelnuovo we hit the road and drove across Italy to the little city of Ravenna, about 100 miles due south of Venice along the Adriatic coast. With 160,000 people today Ravenna might not seem like much, but it was once the capital of the Roman Empire, or at least the western portion of the Roman Empire. For nearly two hundred years, while the rest of Italy was falling into chaos and destitution, Ravenna – closely linked with the still-prosperous eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople – was having its Golden Age. Today the city is supposed to have the greatest collection of eastern mosaics in the world so we came to see for ourselves.

It’s true. Amazing. Eight of the old buildings – all built in the fifth and sixth centuries so today around 1,500 years old – are listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, for obvious reasons when you see them. When we walked into he first one, the Baptistry of the Ariani, we couldn’t believe it. These brilliant, stunning mosaics are 1,500 years old? They precede the Renaissance by a thousand years? It’s small, just a single room, and the mosaics from the walls have all been lost. But the mosaic in the cupola of Christ’s baptism blows you away. And it was free!

(As an aside, one of the great bargains of our travels so far is that for $10 a person you can buy a ticket that lets you into five of the UNESCO sites (two were free and one required a separate ticket). And, just to make it clear that they’re being accommodating, the tickets are good for up to seven days. So take your time, enjoy it, look around. We did, spending parts of four days admiring these ancient mosaics.)

How did all this come to be? Here’s the quick history. Back in 285 AD Emperor Diocletian determined that the Roman Empire was simply too big to be governed effectively from a single location so he divided it into east and west, with co-rulers in charge of their respective spheres. While today the eastern empire is known as Byzantium, the people living there always thought of themselves as Romans, even as they adopted the Greek language and split from the Roman Catholic Church. As the western half of the empire went through it’s long and painful collapse, the east soared under leaders like Constantine, Julian the Apostate, and Justinian.

By 402 Rome itself was considered indefensible and as the Visigoths (western Goths) under Alaric moved in, Emperor Honorius – head of the still-limping western empire and considered one of the worst of all the Roman Emperors – moved the capital first to Milan and then to Ravenna. Alaric proceeded to sack Rome in 410, but the emperors continued to rule the western empire from Ravenna until the last of them, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 476. So for the last 74 years of the (western) Roman Empire, the capital was in Ravenna.

The Germanic general who deposed Romulus Augustus, Odoacer, ruled as King of Italy until the Byzantine Emperor Zeno needed to get another Goth, Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths or western Goths, out of his hair. He suggested that Theodoric invade Ravenna and take the old western empire. Theodoric succeeded in defeating the Visigoths – killing Odoacer with his bare hands, in fact – and ruled Italy from Ravenna for the rest of his life.

His successors weren’t so effective or successful, though, so in 535 Emperor Justinian in Constantinople decided it was time to step back into Italy. He sent his great general Belisarius across the Adriatic to reconquer Italy; by 540 he controlled Ravenna. Thus the city’s Golden Age was reignited, as Ravenna became the seat of the Byzantine Exarch, or governor. There was a lot to clean up as both Odoacer and Theodoric had been Arian Christians, a heresy despised by true Christians. (Arians believed that Christ was created subsequent to God the Father and was thus subordinate to Him. Obviously crazy – who could believe such nonsense? – Arian beliefs were not to be tolerated.)

While the religious battles of sixth century Christians may seem obtuse to us today, they resulted in some great church-building and art in Ravenna. Ultimately the Byzantines held Ravenna, even as the rest of their Italian lands were taken, until the Lombards finally conquered it in 751 and definitively ended Byzantine presence in Italy. For centuries the great churches and mosaics of Ravenna were all but forgotten.

That, then, was Ravenna, a great little find. Oh, and one little note about the marvels of modern technology while admiring ancient art. I like to run, so I headed out one morning for an invigorating five-mile jaunt. I’d scoped out the area and saw that after just a mile or so I’d be out in the country. I go out about 2.5 miles, feeling great on a quiet country road, and turn around to head back. Unfortunately I a missed a turn, got a little lost, and – figuring I knew roughly where to head – kept running. As I neared the five-mile mark I knew I was nowhere near our hotel.

The good news is that I run with my iPhone and, with our SIM cards and data plan, can easily map my location. When I stopped at five miles, then, I pulled out my phone … and saw that I was nearly 2.5 miles from where I was supposed to be. I’d gotten completely turned around. Had I not had the phone and map-making capabilities I’d still be wandering around rural Ravenna.