Today was Easter Sunday and we had been invited by other expat friends to a special lunch at a restaurant over in Monte San Savino.

Easter, known as Pasqua in Italian, is pretty much a day everyone stops, everything closes and families get together.  Keith and I don't celebrate the holiday religiously and usually don't do much but this year we took the opportunity to go out and enjoy a meal.  Other expats new to Italy this year, Ben and Martha, had invited us to join them at a restaurant we know quite well.  The person who used to rent the farmhouse that Ben and Martha now live in was a good friend of ours and had introduced us many times previously to the now infamous Il Cacciatorre.

The restaurant is family run, outside of Monte San Savino and pretty much in the middle of nowhere.  For as remote as it is the restaurant has a popular following and today it was PACKED.

We were warmly greeted by the owner, Paolo, to whom we will always be known as "the friends" of our friend who used to live nearby. 

The tables were very festively decorated.



We had tried our best to starve ourselves for this meal because we knew it would be huge.  They started us off by serving a mixed antipasto plate...



Next up was the first pasta.  Yep, I did say first.  It was a maltagliata (meaning badly cut) with a delicious boscaiola sauce.  Thank goodness I knew there was more to come...



The next pasta is the house specialty, pappardelle con cinghiale!



For the secondo, they served various grilled meats, tagliata, grilled sausage and even lamb.  It was sooo tasty but by this time I was getting so full I didn't think I would be able to handle much more!





Dessert was also very good but I decided to only have a bite and pass, I truly could not eat one more bite of anything.



Here we are, absolutely stuffed out of our minds, but feeling very satisfied after our fabulous lunch!





As we drove back to the farmhouse Ben and Martha are staying in (you might recognize it from previous posts as we stayed here several times when our friend was living here), it was starting to snow!



Hmm...snowing when we left Munich a few days ago and now it is snowing in Tuscany?  I blame it all on us!



The snow started really coming down and they were the biggest, fattest wet flakes.  It was beautiful!





We sat and talked with Ben and Martha, knowing at some point we would have to head for home and feed the dogs.  Just before we were considering leaving, Alessandra called us and asked us what we were doing for dinner.  Seems that her mom was serving up the family leftovers from lunch and wanted to invite us to join them.  We were not even close to being hungry but we had never been invited to Alessandra's mother's house for a big dinner so we were excited to be included along with the rest of the family.

We arrived just in time to sit down at the table with everyone else and my goodness was there a lot of family there!  I know most of Alessandra's immediate family members but there were cousins and aunts and uncles and names were just not something I was going to remember tonight!

They served a special bread/torte for Easter that is cooked with whole eggs inside of it! Eggs are a big thing at Easter time, I'm not sure why, but I do know that many people bring them to church first to be blessed by a priest before serving them in meals later that day.



Alessandra's mom made sure that I got a sample of a VERY tasty torte she had made...



All around us there was a roar of voices, everyone was talking over each other and gestulating, the kids were laughing and playing, Keith and I just sat and simply enjoyed this close family interact with each over their Easter dinner.

A week ago we had stopped by the Vestri chocolate store in Arezzo, known to be one of the finest chocolates around.  We had picked out a supersize chocolate Easter egg of 80% dark chocolate and brought it along tonight to share with everyone else.  The kids were VERY excited to help open it up and find out what prize was inside.



I'm happy to report that it was some of the best chocolate I have ever tasted!

We continued to have fun, drinking wine, laughing, I got the lowdown from the cousin who is a Carabinieri on the targeting of foreigners when stopping cars (the answer was a big, fat YES, they do racially target cars they stop!), and we just sat with the Federici family, enjoying the evening along with them.



Before you say anything, I was hamming it up for the camera!  It defiitely was a REALLY fun night, thank you famiglia Federici!

We came home to our kids crashed out all over the floor...

...sounds like a good idea to me!  After everything we ate today I couldn't think of doing anything else BUT going immediately straight to bed!

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