Of all the wine towns in Tuscany, Montepulciano is the easiest to get to from my family's hilltop hideaway in neighboring Umbria. The problem is that Montepulciano is also the closest wine town to the Autostrada that runs between Rome to Florence. Touists exit the highway by the busload at Chianciano Terme (a thermal spa reminiscent of the setting for Fellini's 8 1/2) and labor up a road circumnavigating the steep hill. Then—boom!—they're in Lord of the Rings. The buses park outside the medieval walls, and the holidaymaking hordes thread their way through a great stone portal and climb the steep cobbled streets. I went with my daughter and her boyfriend, intent on introducing them to the pleasures of drinking wine in the town where it is produced. We arrived in the middle of the hottest summer in recent memory. A roadside thermometer read 41 degrees Centigrade (106 degrees Fahrenheit), yet the temperature didn't deter the throngs who huffed and puffed up the Gracciano nel Corso. It was just after one p.m., with the burning sun at its apex, when we decided we were starving. We passed on a Jolly Café—a franchise specializing in bags of chips and desiccated little panini—and also rejected a pizza parlor with outdoor seating, where the pale puffy faces of a large German family too much resembled the doughy underdone pies set in front of them. As we ascended the hill at what seemed like a 45 degree angle, the crowds thinned, and so did the frequency of kiosks crammed with gelato, postcards, and souvenir aprons emblazoned with steaming plates of spaghetti. Suddenly up ahead loomed Caffé Poliziano, named after a Renaissance poet born in the town. The place was rather swank in a rustic sort of way, and a handbill suggested it was a favorite of Fellini's, who enthusiastically compared it to Vienna and Prague. "It's only a pastry shop," I lamented. "But look, there's also a lunch menu," my daughter riposted. And indeed there was, offering a few typical Tuscan dishes, including carpaccios, pastas, and a handful of hot secondi at rather modest prices.
Appurtentant to the pastry shop and down a few steps was a dining room with windows flung open to reveal a splendid view of the undulating Val di Chiana countryside. Though the décor was right out of the 1920s, the menu boasted an 1868 origin. My daughter ordered the panzanella, a well-oiled salad of the area's notorious saltless bread tossed with tomatoes and cucumbers. This version was pleasantly vinegary and surmounted with a little heap of chopped raw onions, and it had been carefully shaped into a truncated cone in a topiary style of panzanella we'd never seen before. The tomatoes were as sweet as a sunny day on Mount Olympus.
Other dishes quickly followed, including an octopus carpaccio in which the tentacles had been bound gelatinously together and sliced into what looked like headcheese, and a homemade gnocchi in a subtle pork ragu. The meal for three with many bottles of fizzy water ran less than 50 Euros—and we left refreshed, but unable to find room for the cream-oozing napoleons and dainty cookies that filled the pastry cases. On to the wine bars! Caffé Poliziano Via di Voltaia nel Corso, 27 Montepulciano, Tuscany, Italy