Buona Sera,

My weekend is just about coming to an end. On Friday I went to Pisa to see the leaning tower. It is only about an hour train ride from Florence which is great. Unfortunately the weather wasn't so great but it was still a lot of fun. The tower was leaning quite a bit! It was very weird to see a building that wasn't straight. Pisa is a pretty small town so we went to see the tower, bought a few souvenirs, went out to pizza and then headed back. Even though it was quite rainy and windy my friends and I took all the typical pictures of 'holding up' the tower or 'pushing it over'. It was great!

Saturday night I went to a soccer game with my study abroad program. It was about 2 hours and a pretty intense game. In the end Fiorentina (the Florence team) won 4-2! They scored their 2nd, 3rd and 4th goal all in the second half within about 10 minutes so it was very exciting! It was definitely chilly outside though! The last few days the temperature has dropped so by the time the game was over I was definitely ready to come back to my apartment and warm up!

Today I went on a day trip to Lucca with my study abroad program. Lucca is a small town an hour away from Florence. Today was perfect weather except that it was pretty cold! It was a high of 49 which is about 10 degrees colder than it has been recently. Still it was great. Lucca was a very cute town that is completely surrounded by walls built in the 1500's (still in great condition). We got a walking tour when we got there which was good. After we got some free time so we got some lunch and them climbed a tower in Lucca. 230 stairs and we got a great view of the the town! The view was especially good because it was a perfectly blue sky.

After Lucca we took a bus to the countryside in Tuscany for oil tasting. When we got there we first got a tour of the area and after we got to taste some oil & wine plus got a little food. The area was really pretty. Every time I go to the Tuscan countryside I love it! Since the grape harvest is over most of the vines have lost all of their leaves and look pretty dead. Luckily since I had been on other wine tasting trips earlier in the semester I got to see them during harvest with all the grapes. We also got to see olive trees and learned all about how olive oil was made. It was very cool. On the other trips they talked about how wine was made so it was fun to actually hear about the olive oil and learn a bit about it.

I found out a lot of interesting things about olives. First if you eat an olive right off the tree it is very bitter. This unfortunately is from experience since I tried it once, they definitely aren't good from the tree! Also black and green olives come from the same tree. Earlier in the season all the olives are green and if you let them keep growing on the tree they turn black. To make a liter of olive oil you probably need about 1000 olives, so overall it isn't a very profitable business. According to the guy who gave us the tour people who own vineyards get rich from the wine but definitely not the olive oil.

To make the oil they harvest the olives and put them through a machine overnight. The machine works to chop them up into tiny pieces. The pieces are then put on flat circular things about 2 ft in diameter (not sure what material it is). They are all put in a giant pile (in terms of shape it kind of looks like a 5 ft tall pile of flat donuts). Then another machine presses this pile and squishes all of the liquid out of the olives. This liquid is water and oil. They then use a special process to separate the water and oil. Then you have your olive oil! When oil is extra virgin olive oil it means he acidity is less than 1%. Apparently the reason you can by cheap extra virgin olive oil in the store is because big companies use olives of worse quality (never Tuscan olives since Tuscans don't sell them to anyone else). The companies are forced to get their olives from other places. They then use a chemical process to make the acidity less than 1%. After that they have to remove all the chemicals they used to do that. In the process they take out some of the flavor and nutrients. Thus real extra virgin olive oil may be more expensive but is much better!

After the tour we got to try the olive oil which was delicious! We also got to try 2 wines, 2 salami, and some biscotti. It was a pretty good snack! After that we headed back to Florence. It was definitely a fun day, I really enjoyed Lucca.

Well that is it for my weekend so hope everyone is good and staying warm! I've been told it is freezing in CT and MA recently! Everyone have a great Thanksgiving!

Ciao Tutti!