Flowers and Photo’s

Now that is a meatball people!

This spring we were happy to plan our visit to Tuscany around an Annual Festival of Camilla’s. Lovely flowers full of fragrance and colors. The festival is advertised all over as a Lucca Festival but is actually outside of Lucca-you park in a car lot and they shuttle you up to a lovely small medieval town where you get to walk at your own pace and see the flowers, visit the working tea farm, and lucky us…eat!!!

For 15 e we bought a ticket booklet that we used at 12 booths. Each included a course-antipasta featuring local olive oil (that was soooo cool as we had visited that olive estate last year), then a wine tasting, then saluma, then wine, then ravioli, wine…you get the picture. We also had been and farro soup(the kids favorite), HUGE meatballs, and lovely breads, pies and cookies(dolce)…and more wine.

One thing I learned is the local sausage was not cooked…hhhmmm… now I am very adventurous in the food arena but I also have owned food establishments with my Chef hubby and managed one too many kitchens to eat raw sausage. My tour guide Heather from Saporie-Saperi (also a member of the local Slow Food movement) said the sausage is safe, as the farmer knows exactly what the animal ate, how it was butchered and it is all local, not shipped from far away like we do in the States. My cousin gave it a shot and loved it! I was still a little uncertain so I ate more of…everything else!

My favorite was the amazing ravioli-seriously could not get any fresher. And sitting on an old stone wall overlooking the Tuscan hills made it taste all the better.

The farm where the camila’s are cultivated for tea was lovely. Enjoy the pics the kid took…so lovely.