Our third (and final) agriturismo in Italy – in Emilia Romagna!

As I’ve talked about before, we have love love loved agriturismo life in Italy. We lived on one in Montecarlo and then on another in the Chianti region. Today I wanted to write about our third (and final, sad face) agriturismo stay during our time in Italy, this time in the Emilia Romagna region!

What is Emilia Romagna?

Emilia Romagna is an area in the north of Italy. It isn’t really a state, but is instead composed of nine provinces, and is especially important for authentic Italian foods (which I’ll get deeper into in another post). It has a varied landscape, from plains to mountains to hills, but much of it is very conducive to crops and farming. We first thought about heading to this area mainly to go to Parma and Modena, and then when we found the villa we ended up staying in, we were sold!

The house itself and a new travel companion!

The villa we found and booked was actually a bit further north than we had originally wanted. It was about an hour and a half away from Parma and even further from Modena. But, La Costa Piozzano was just too beautiful and amazing to pass up! Piozzano, where the villa is, is a small town of about 45 square kilometers and less than 1,000 people, and it is located in the very northwest corner of Emilia Romagna.

We stayed in a two bedroom apartment in the villa (the apartment was called Casa Bea) because …. we had a visitor, yay! Our friend, Merritt (who was on the gymnastics team with Damian at MIT) joined us for our time in Piozzano and also Florence. So fun! A bunch of the pictures in this post are ones that Merritt took, thank you Merritt!

So, let’s start with the views. Check these out. (It’s especially hard to beat the view in the third picture below, ha!).

We had an amazing perch on top of a hill and we could see farms and gorgeousness way far out. I had a bout of insomnia one night and got to capture a sunrise, and the sunsets were just beautiful as well (no insomnia needed to capture those)!

The inside of the house was really cute and gave us lots of space to relax and hang out and play cards together. We of course did a lot of World Cup viewing during this time and we also cooked a bunch. I love the picture below of me and Damian. We have all the iconic pictures from all these famous landmarks, but this one is one of my favorites because it shows us in the everyday. Relaxed, hanging out, in love, being silly and laughing.

And finally, the pièce de resistance of this place – the pool! The pool was set up on the hill as well and had a stunning view of the Emilia Romagna countryside. We spent many hours here relaxing, swimming and laughing. We also had some fun contests (I won, obviously) and the gymnasts got to practice their moves. It really is hard to beat a great pool.

What did we do?

We spent a lot of time just hanging out and relaxing, but somehow our eight days in Piozzano flew by! One day we drove back down to the Florence airport to pick up Merritt and on the way back stopped in a little town to watch Brazil play in the World Cup (RIP).

We spent a day hiking Cinque Terre (post coming up later) and also explored the local small towns near Piozzano. On July 4^th we decided to head to Piacenza (about 30 minutes away) because there was a festival there to honor Saint Antonino.

Piacenza was another cute town in Emilia Romagna, and we spent a bunch of time just walking around and enjoying the atmosphere. We had a delicious dinner and ate some scrumptious gelato. We also stayed around for the entertainment, but it ended up being a bit more for the older folks than for us, so we called it a night pretty quickly after the singing started.

We had a blast just at the villa itself, but I can’t wait to share more about what else we did in Emilia Romagna; it’ll be coming soon, followed by our time in Florence and Rome!

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Read more about our time in Italy using the links below:

• Italy Country Recap – What we loved (and didn’t love) in our six weeks there
• Italy – The plan for our six weeks here
• Italy – Visiting Pisa – the Leaning Tower and the Luminara festival
• Italy – Our day in Lucca
• Italy – Life on an agriturismo in Italy Part 1: Montecarlo (Tuscany)
• Italy – Four days in Bologna
• Italy – Life on an agriturismo in Italy Part 2: a vineyard in the Chianti region (Tuscany)
• Italy – Wineries and wine tasting in Chianti
• Italy – One day in Siena!
• Italy – Life on an agriturismo in Italy Part 3: Emilia Romagna (you are here!)
• Italy – Parmigiano Reggiano cheese factory and Balsamic Vinegar producer tours
• Italy – Hiking Cinque Terre
• Italy – Our three days in Florence
• Italy – Brunello wine tasting and visiting thermal baths
• Italy – Our three days in Rome