Our next stop was also a former farm converted into a B&B on the western side of Tuscany. This one was a little further south than the Bandita. How I caused us to do this backtracking isn't clear but once the reservations were made...
Le Fontanella is located near Montemoreno and Manciano a little ways off of the road between the coast and Orvieto.
Our room was in one of the out buildings. Gail is
finishing lunch on the patio. That is the rear of our small, dusty,
Renault.
This is the main building 
and this is Montemoreno as seen from our patio.
This Thursday was our busiest day of the
trip. In addition to changing B&B's, we did a fair amount of
sightseeing. We drove east across the mountains, into Umbria and up to
Assisi to see St Francis' church (cathedral, basilica?). It was damaged by
earthquake a few years ago but has been repaired and restored very nicely.
While we were standing in this optical
illusion, 
prior to entering the lower chapel straight ahead, we saw a group of young
priests (Friars maybe) who were obviously a tour group among all of the
tourists. When we entered the chapel we discovered a group of teen-agers
in one of the naves singing a hymn accompanied by three guitars. Kind of
neat. Then we went down into the crypt chapel and found the group of
Friars chanting something in some language, Latin maybe. Really
cool. After that we went up to the main church and admired the paintings
and took this picture of the front door.
Having checked off Assisi, we started backing tracking towards our B&B. The next stop was Deruta, home of fancy pottery. We did our part to keep the local economy flourishing even after noting that our earlier purchases of Franco Mari pottery had doubled in value.
The next stop on this venture was Orvieto,
home of Orvieto Classsico, one of the white wines you can find in most liquor
stores and many supermarkets across America. Orvieto is built on a butte
like structure (a volcanic plug?) and is in sight of the main north-south
Autostrada. We have driven by it many times each time saying we were going
to stop there some day. Well, some day finally arrived. Orvieto
turned out to be a charming place and is on our list of places to return to for
a longer visit. Here is a shot of their Duomo.
We left Orvieto just before sunset and paused on the road to take this picture.
We made our final stop of the day at the town of Pitigliano, another town that is sort of built on a cliff and is on our list of places needing more exploration. We had dinner in the old town section. While looking for a parking spot, I had reason to be glad that we had rented a small car. I went through one squeeze that was tight enough to bump the rear view mirror on our little car.