I was feeling lucky. That was my excuse for going to Siena in winter, when Tuscany is generally cold and rainy.
But rules were made to be broken in Italy, I've found. In Rome, you can wake up on a winter morning with rain beating on the window, bundle up and go outside and find yourself wishing you had sunglasses instead of an umbrella.
So my sister Martha and I took a gamble by planning a driving tour through southern Tuscany in the low season. Neither of us had been to Siena, about 150 miles north of Rome. And I wanted to see the Tuscan countryside, the model for paradise in paintings by 14th- and 15th-century Sienese masters.
