Furlo

I've realized that in the past ten years my brain has been a bit over saturated with images of Tuscany. Every coffee table books seems to have a picture of rolling hills, with a patchwork of green and yellow fields, cypress trees on a ridge in the distance, and an old farm house with some fantastic plaster color that screams, "yes, I could be in a fresco!" It's really beautiful, and to be honest, I didn't expect EVERY view to be like this, but it is, and I'm a bit over it. Okay, central Italy, you're beautiful, I get it.

But on the way home from Urbino, we found a landscape that bowled us over. We decided to take the autrostrada (I know better, but I just couldn't handle the hairpin road again and neither could John's stomach). Fortunately at Furlo, we took a wrong turn which pulled us off the autrostrada and onto a small road through the town. As we realized later, we pulled off just in time because the autostrada tunnels through this whole area, and we would have missed it.

The landscape, which had been green and mountainous, suddenly started to expose large escarpments of stone. The exposed rock became more prevalent and steeper, and suddenly we were driving through a gorge. On the left, at the bottom of the gorge, a gorgeous river appeared, held back by a lovely dam. On the right, the road wound through an old rock tunnel, past an altar to Mary placed in a hollow in the stone, and continued along the gorge. It was breathtaking.