A day in Italy

It has been over a month now since Simona and I came to Italy to visit her family and work with our clients, and we are starting to get a little bored.  We have been snowed in recently by a localized storm that seems to want nothing more than to sit off the coast of Italy and berate us with cold air and feed us a healthy diet of snow and ice. Last week we got over 10" (25 cm) of snow that essentially shut down the country, and while the north of Italy is still being ravaged by this storm we in Tuscany have seen little snow since.  On a side note, Rome ("the one and the only") received about 1.5-2.5" (3-6 cm as i have been corrected) and had to shut down the entire city and made an uproar about how they "were not warned", while in the North over 27 people have died because of the METERS upon METERS of snow they have gotten and cannot get out of their house to get food.   Now, over a week later Anghiari (where Simona and her family are from), still has streets shut down because there are very few plows and even fewer that can fit down the old streets.  It was in this spirit that we decided to go out this afternoon when the weather finally let up and the sky was as blue as the ocean staring back at us and take some pictures of the beauty that Italy offers.  All kidding aside, this is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, and sights like this make it even better.