The Domi, the Hayden and I went to stay at a farm in Chianti (vineyard/olive oilery). It's an Agriturismo thing - one of a bunch of Italian farms that have set up a small accommodation bit, and its revenue gets put back into the farm. A brilliant system, especially when it means surprisingly cheap rustic-muffin accommodation for us on a well maintained, GORGEOUS farm and a welcome gift of wine and olive oil. Mmm Mmm!!
So we stayed 3 nights with bleeding gorgeous views of San Gimignano (medieval Manhattan), drank, swam, cooked bolognese and risotto, had Limoncello, panforte, regional cookies and fragoli liquor, bread with olive oil for lunch, that sort of thing. Amazingly we also managed to squeeze in trips to Siena (where they were setting up for the horse race), Monteriggioni, Volterra, and San Gimignano. On our last night we scored an outrageous panoramic-view dinner in San Gim which included Hayden and Dom sharing a Florentine steak (3 fingers thick) and me working through gnocchi with truffles and cheese. Honestly, we couldn't even order a dessert between us.
So after this dreadfully relaxing and stupidly-gorgeous-in-every-way holiday, we drove back to Spain via the scenic route. We went past La Spezia, got lost for lunch somewhere near Genova, saw Nice (and swam there), Cannes and stayed the night in Toulon. Having managed to drive through the busy delightfully smelly sunday market there (olives, rosemary), we went off to spend the day in Marseille. Didn't see white peugeot taxis, but did climb up to the Notre Dame and had another very enjoyable, panoramic day. We later got caught in a massive traffic jam, and jam of diversion of traffic jam, where we decided to stop off and have a french pizza from a mobile pizza place mid-jam, which was kind of sweet.

So here we are back in Barcelona with lots more wine bottles, a huge hunk of left-over parmesan and Pepe. It doesn't seem like much of a step down, except it's very noisy during the summer nights here, and we are adjusting to some new housemates. Crazy ones, that get up at 5:45am and go for a run, then go back to bed...