Our customized walks in Tuscany

When we're on holiday, Jane and I like to walk and eat. Eating well in Italy is easy but how do you find the good walks?

We've tried using a few walking guidebooks but none have met our expectations. We've also considered supported walking tours and some of them sound good but they are pretty expensive. For this trip we selected two towns as "base camps" and planned our own walks. It has worked even better than we hoped!

The first thing was to pick towns big enough to be interesting and to have an apartment for rent but small enough to have country roads accessible without a long walk (we didn't rent a car). We knew Greve in Chianti was perfect because we'd been there before. Our second town, Colle Val d'Elsa seemed good based on how it looked in Google Earth. Another good indicator for Colle was that a search for "walking tours in Tuscany" brought up some commercial itineraries that included a walk from San Gimignano, through Colle, to Monteriggioni, both about 10 km away. The walking tour websites don't usually publish detailed maps but rough maps or verbal itineraries are sufficient to make educated guesses.

Here are Colle Val d'Elsa, Italy and Williams Lake, Canada in Google Earth at the same scale. It's interesting that Colle has 20,000 people versus Williams Lake's 10,000 and yet it's urban footprint appears much smaller. With thousands of little farms and country roads, it's much easier to plan a variety of walks around Colle than around Williams Lake!

If you pick an area (like Colle) where you want to walk, and zoom in with Google Earth, you can identify the minor roads and farm paths (good for walking). I did this on my laptop and transferred the tracks to a handheld GPS but you could also use a smartphone.  

Williams Lake, BC. Distance is about 10 km from left to right.

Colle Val d'Elsa (right of centre) at the same scale as above.
The yellow line is a 14.6 km walk that we did last Monday

 Here are a couple photos from that day.

Walking through the olive grove.

San Gimignano in the distance, between the olive trees

Another nice thing about Colle is that it just happens to be on the "Via Francigena" (Franciscan way) which is an old route that pilgrims travelled from Canterbury to Rome. It's now a well-used and marked route for walkers like the Camino De Santiago in Spain.

"Via Francigena" from Canterbury to Rome.
(Non-pilgrims are permitted ;-)