Got to Hereward & Daiva on Tuesday late afternoon.  Both looking tanned & well.  a very warm welcome, a good supper and then (after 8.30pm) a 40-minute drive to the thermal baths at Terme di Petriolo.  Bliss to soak my tired legs in hot sulphurous sping waters! Yesterday a gentle day.  Sitting around drinking coffee and catching up on route planning & reporting for a couple of hours - then an hour's drive to Piensa for a long chatty lunch with Franz Xavier. An evening visit to neighbours Yoav, Perla, Sofia and Ioni. Last night didn`t get to sleep until 4.30am . . . . A mostly lovely day's ride through glorious Tuscan countryside (so difficult to describe without using cliché or hyperbole) and charming Tuscan hilltop villages. The 12thC Sant’Antimo Abbey near Montalcino was well-worth visiting.  Scenes in the movie The English Patient were filmed there. Tall, gracious, serene -  several of the the column head-piece sculptures (there must be a name for them) weathered almost out of recognition during the centuries the abbey stood as a ruin, before being renovated in the 1870s. The Cathedral of the Most Holy Saviour in Montalcino less so.  Baroque mostly leaves me cold. Agrocampeggio Madonna di Pogi down a frustratingly long, winfly hilly gravel road.  My abode turns out to be a small cabin in the wood, 400yds from communal showers & loos Italian roads are in disrepair in a different way to those in England.  In England we specialise in deep pot-holes, often in otherwise good surfaces so that you are upon them (and in them) before you see them.  A serious danger to bicyclists.  In Italy, not so many pot-holes, but a pervasive crackular across all but the central third off the road - mostly angled crossways - such that one judders along on a bicycle.