We stayed a week in Alba Adriática before we were able to return to Cesena to have our new generator installed. We arrived at TecnoFreeTime in the early afternoon and the equipment was fitted within a few hours and we were soon ready to be on our way.
We stopped overnight in a small town of Barberino di Mugello, 35 km north of Florence where there was a restaurant called La Cavallina.
The restaurant opened for evening meals at 7 pm – being Brits we were the first ones through the door. Already there was a group hungry truck drivers hanging around the entrance; fifty or more drivers must have piled into the restaurant during the next twenty minutes.
As we were shown to our (shared) table, jugs of red wine and baskets of bread were distributed, the cacophony around us made it impossible to hear each other speak. We didn’t have to wait long before a waiter showed us an enormous uncooked T-bone steak. They told us what it weighed and the cost before it was taken to be cooked (rare) on an oak wood fire.
After cooking the meat was carved from the bone and served on a brazier of warm embers, plus a salad and some roasted potatoes. It was the most delicious piece of beef we had tasted in a long time. When we left the restaurant an hour or so later, the car park was jam packed with lorries – our little truck was totally hemmed in. In the morning when we looked out, all the lorries had disappeared like ghosts in the mist, leaving us alone in the deserted car park. Our evening had cost €120, we didn’t get an itemised bill but we had coffee, shared a dessert and bought some biscuits from the counter – plus our overnight parking. Pretty good value, we felt, for such an exceptionally good meal.
