July 15, 2011 -- Wandering Tuscany. Francesco and I spent the morning working on one of his telescopes. After disassembling the mountain and cleaning some of the worm gears (I don't want to get too technical), we were able to make the drives on the mount work nicely.

Francesco arranged for us to visit Villa Ferraia (http://www.villaferraia.com) for an evening of food, drink and astronomy. Vittorio, the owner of the villa has a 14" Meade telescope in an observatory. We set out by car around 1 p.m. and headed into the country-side. Along the way, we visited a number of Medieval villages including Montancino, Sant' Antimo and finally Tocchi where the Villa Ferrais is located.

Vittorio's Villa is in a fairly remote part of the country-side and we drove over a rough dirt road for about 20 minutes. Yet, there were many visitors at the Villa, including people from Europe, the U.S. and "down under". There's a beautiful swimming pool with lush grounds and gardens.

After dinner, we set out for the observatory at about 10 p.m. The moon was up and pretty bright, but we were still able to see quite a nice selection of deep-sky objects.

Today we'll be heading into Florence for a couple of days of sightseeing and exploration. Among the sights we want to see is the U.S. Military Cemetery which is the final resting place to more than 50,000 WWII soldiers.s including the great globular star cluster in Hercules. We explored the skies, drank some wine and talked until we all agreed it was time to head home at around midnight.

More to come.. Stay tuned.