An agritourismo is a farmhouse which rents rooms to tourists and sometimes involves the guests in the farm operations. In our case, the place we stayed was more like a villa, in fact it is called the Villa Cennina and there were no farm chores for us to do.

This is the villa.

This was the foyer of the villa.

We met outdoors for drinks and introductions of our buddy on the tour. After that we went to the kitchen to help prepare our evening meal. We started by rolling out the pici noodles, a fat, hand-formed spaghetti from the countryside surrounding Siena.

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Here is one plate of noodles after a half hour of working on them.

We then started working on the potato gnocchi, peeling the potatoes, ricing them, mixing them with an egg and flour and kneading them.

The dough is then kneaded, rolled into strips, cut and given some texture with a fork.

Later in the evening we were served a great dinner. The pasta plate included both pici noodles with a tomato sauce and potato gnocchi with arugula pesto which our cooking instructor had made. Both were very good although the lack of quality control as to size was evident!

After all our hard work(! )and the good food and wine, we were ready for sleep that night. We also needed to rest for for a busy day the next day in Siena after the more leisurely pace today.