June 21
Without GPS we would have never found the restaurant as it was down a hill and on an unpaved road. Even once we arrived I thought we were in the wrong place. We weren’t and ended up having a wonderful dinner. We sat with 2 other couples staying at the resort. The first 5 days they were in Italy the took a Vespa tour around Tuscany. That’s not something on our list of things to do but they loved it.
Dinner was a traditional Italian 4-course meal beginning with the Antipasta.
Then it was on to the prima patti which is a pasta dish. This time it was pasta with a simple ragu sauce like the kind we learned to make at our Italian cooking class in 2016.
By this time I was pretty full but we still had two more courses to go. The next was the secondi patti, which is the second plate, and could be meat or fish. We had very thinly sliced roast pork with roasted potatoes. This is a typical Tuscan secondi patti that we also made in our cooking class.
Finally it was time for the last course, the dolce. There were about 10 to pick from so it was a tough choice. Both were delicious.
Then of course there was wine and Peter finished his dinner off with coffee American which turned into an expresso. Dinner last 2 1/2 hours which is the only way you can eat so much food at one time. Roberta, our street food tour guide in Bologna, said it is rare for Italians to eat a full meal like this. She said they usually have either a prima patti or a secondi patti but not both. A full meal is saved for special occasions. Peter and I had talked about doing this before we left and since this dinner was arranged by the resort with other guests, we thought it was a great time to do it. We’re so glad we did. It was a lot of food late in the evening but it was a ton of fun.