Montlake's next neighborhood migration will be to San Gimignano and Montalcino in Tuscany at the end of June 2001. The general idea is to spend 4 nights together in Montalcino, a rural and ancient hilltop town, and another 4 nights in a country setting near San Gimignano.
People can meander about Italy at their own pace on their own before or afterwards.
We're staying in commercial hotels, and so everyone is able book their hotel reservations separately. The town hall with its large windows and famous tower reflects the empathy between the renaissance particians and their elected government. After ancient Greece, the Renasissance was the grandest turning point in the largely sordid history of western civilization. As the works of the great Greeks were rediscovered, education spread from the realm of a few noblemen and priests to both sexes of the middle classes. Leonardo separated inquiry from dogma around 1500, and a century later Galileo reinvented all of science singlehandedly.