The rally experience was hopefully a once in a lifetime event. We came in via the top of the mountain, and our agroturismo was halfway down the mountain in the middle of the forest. As we descended, we kept hearing car horns blasting. We weren't too sure if we had missed the driveway, and were being persued by our hosts, or if it was just someone giving the usual warnings on the hairpin bends (of which there were around sixty on the mountain). It must have gone on for three or four minutes, before we saw our driveway and pulled in. Not 50 metres behind us, the first of twenty rally cars passed by. We went so close to being slammed from behind. Our hosts were livid that they had not ben advised that they were rallying, as is the done thing in the mountain villages.

After that, we breezed through the next two weeks as we daily ventured down and back up the mountain, and navigated the road along the valley floor, fighting for road space with trucks carting paper products from the mills.

It was worth it, as our appartment looked out across the Pescia Valley to another seven medieval villages perched on the ridges around the valley, all surrounded by Chestnut forests. The singularly most stunning place we stayed in, in Italy. cheers Gavin