Let me start my night off with dinner (as usual) in the city. We walk into our favorite restaurant (where we have befriended the owner and his family) to get some food to find the small ristorante is swamped! We start to leave when he suddenly tells us to wait...apparently there is an upstairs? We follow the hostess up the stairs hesitantly not knowing what to expect (I always thought maybe they lived up there) and are welcomed with a HUGE dining room filled with even more people. There is a giant frescoe on the ceiling and I am astonished at how beautiful everything is arranged. There is a large party taking up almost the entire room so then the hostess decides to put us in yet another dining room upstairs...where does this space come from? Everything seems so tiny!
I have yet another delicious meal - gnocchi with bacon, pepper, and a blush cream sauce and of course I share two dessert dishes with my friend Lauren - Torte della Nonna (grandma's tarte) and a tartufo (chocolate ice cream in a solid frozen ball of fresh cocoa powder and a small vanilla center). Amazing to say the least. We take our time eating to be sure we don't show up at the pub "Americanly" early.
The pub here, Quo Vadis, is the only drinking establishment in all of Volterra... let's just say we weren't hopeful that it would live up to our Roman standards. We walk into the pub so excited just to see more than 10 people in one place for the first time since we've been here. The pub is calm and people are casually grabbing a drink. We notice a few more tables and walk over to sit as a group... one of the girls happens to notice a bunch of people making their way down a large flight of stone stairs - something is telling us to follow.
SUPRISE - there is a huge lounge down in this stone passage filled with people socializing and playing billards. Oh wait, it gets better. We look around the corner (continuing to follow the native Italians) and realize that there's even more - a disco room! There is American music featuring the Beach Boys (yes, really), Aretha Franklin and lots of modern American music. I truely couldn't believe it. I felt as though we had found a buried treasure. An entire nightlife scene thriving underneath the ground in Volterra - who would've ever guessed!? The entire night I was in disbelief of how awesome it was to be in the ONE place available in Volterra with what seemed to be all the young people in town. This is 100% an experience I will never forget and will tell people about for a long time. It's one of those things you truely must see to believe.Stone walls, underground = no noise leaking into the streets...why don't we do this in America?
Visit their webpage here...(it's really hard to find on your own!)
My summary of Volterra thus far - There's always more than what we see.
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