Old bikes, chestnuts and new projects...

October is one of my favourite months here.  The L'Intrepida takes place and the autumn festivals are well under way.   

L’Intrepida is an annual bike event where many of the (fitter) locals get involved in cycling around our local area on old bicycles wearing vintage clothes. This year we followed the cyclists through the hilltop towns and villages in our little Fiat 500.

Such a fun day and without realizing it, my attire for the day had a vintage feel!  (Many of the villagers also dress up in vintage clothes as you will see from the images below). With some tweed culottes and a weird hat I bought many years ago, I totally looked the part.

I am seriously contemplating going the full hog next year. I have a faux fur cape that would be perfect, one that I bought to put over an evening dress (when I actually wore evening dresses) and that I thought I would never wear again but hey... I'm not sure Leigh is ready for plus fours yet though! Ha ha.

It was a lovely day and the weather was beautiful too.

The chestnuts are being harvested now which means you often see cars parked up on the side of the road and locals collecting the fallen chestnuts.  And for those of us that can’t tell a chestnut tree from an oak(!) you can always find a chestnut fare on somewhere.  So we popped up to Caprese Michelangelo one morning to get some chestnuts, look around the stalls and have a coffee and cake of course. 

There is always home made wine on offer which allegedly goes with chestnuts but I really don’t like it which is unusual because it is wine after all! It just tastes a bit like alcoholic Ribena. 

I have never been a fan of chestnuts either to be honest, mainly because neither Leigh nor I knew what to do with them and because they look a bit like conkers. But last year our lovely neighbour left a bag of chestnuts outside our front door so we thought it was about time we looked up cooking instructions to see what all the fuss is about.  With a bit of trial and error we (Leigh) managed to get some to the point where they tasted absolutely delicious and not like conkers at all. 

So we felt like proper Italians at the fare, buying a massive bag of chestnuts to cook over our open fire with our holey frying pan. Yum.

The Casa Leana garden is looking very autumnal - we have some little trees on the top lawn that have the most beautiful red leaves. All of which have now fallen and they even look beautiful on the ground.. Or is that just me being weird?!


So the end of the season is near which means project time when we can get on with new and exciting projects.  The ultimate plan, as always, is to improve and update Casa Leana. We have a few already in progress. We know an amazing metal work company who we have charged with fencing our parking area and an external gate on our wine room.

I know it sounds crazy but we still get excited about projects! We are also putting a new larger pergola on the top garden and moving that one to the garden overlooking the vineyard. I love project time. Sad but true. Watch this space for more projects (once I think of them!).

I think that's it. We have had some lovely guests from the UK for the last two weeks enjoying the CL heated pool. It really feels like things are getting back to normal just in time for the last week of the season! We are looking forward to a bumper 2022, having already sold 28 weeks - a new Casa Leana record.
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Have a lovely week...

D I A N A   xxx