Last year Friends of Roman Cats was given a wonderful gift of a week in a private house in a small town in Tuscany. It was donated by Siglinda Scarpa, a marvelous Italian  artist, ceramicist and animal lover. We wish to thank her for her generosity! You can find out more about her and her work at www.siglindascarpa.com Below is a piece by the San Francisco woman who won the raffle of a week in Siglind's house. The proceeds of the raffle went to our St Francis fund for the medical needs of Bay Area feral cats. A Single Raffle Ticket! What a surprise to come home one Sunday evening a summer ago to find out we had won a week in a villa in Tuscany. I had merely bought a raffle ticket from the lovely ladies who have the organization called  "Friends of Roman Cats". A wonderful Italian woman, Sigalinda Scarpa, an animal lover who now lives in North Carolina, donated the use of her villa to allow Friends of Roman Cats make some money to help Italy’s homeless cats. Siglinda was born in Italy and has kept two homes in Tuscany and another in Rome. We won a week at her smaller Tuscan house, but she generously gave us the larger house. This was so great, now, as well as my husband Lee, we could take my sister Dolores. When we told her, she was so excited she could not sleep that night. So off we went to San Lorenzo a Merse, tiny village of about a hundred people in the heart of Tuscany. When I asked some of the inhabitants how many people there were in the town, no one seemed to be certain of the exact figure. There was one grocery market which doubled as a coffee and sandwich place. It was also the local bar and of course the gathering place for the townspeople. One couple owned it all. They welcomed us with open arms; we were the "people from America" We were met by the caretaker who was standing by the gates of the village waiting for us. A local cat had gotten into our villa and also waited for us. We were told it was just a village cat. The house specifics were given to us. It is a huge place with three floors. The top was my sister's own apartment. The second floor had the kitchen, a huge open Italian fireplace and a sitting room. The downstairs was a huge open room; it was our bedroom with bath and a separate shower. The town people grow all sorts of fruit and were picking apples during our stay. The town itself is nestled in the beautiful Tuscan hillside. There are wild boars, we were told. I guess they were right because one morning while jogging before daylight I heard one snorting in the hillside I never ran so fast in my life. The first morning we went to gas up at the local Agip gas station. It is like our Chevron only they have all kinds of goodies including cappuccino, expresso and pannini. We met a friendly young man named Max who was excited to practice his English He in fact lived in America for a while. Little did he know at the time, how much he would get to practice his English. Later that day, evening in fact, we got a severely flat tire, that damaged the rim. So we opened the trunk and there was no spare tire and no jack. It was dark and quite late, we went to the local gathering place and asked to call the gas station just on a whim that Max would be there. He was, and came right over. He arranged to have the car towed and arranged to have us get to the Florence airport the next morning to get a new car , Unfortunately, it was a Sunday! Anyone who has ever been to Italy or lived in Italy knows that everything stops on Sunday. So this was a real feat in itself.  We were over 2 hours away from the Florence airport. Through all this he would take absolutely no money. With our new car, we traveled from the villa each day to a different place, one more beautiful than the next. We traveled to San Gimignano, Assisi, Pisa, Lucca, Siena, which was quite close, and of course to Florence. We went to markets and Duomos and climbed many towers including the leaning tower in Pisa. My sister was truly a trooper! Thank goodness we were able to get so much in, as on the second to last day of our trip she fell in our hotel in Venice and broke her ankle. When the time came to leave our little village we turned in our key to one of the women of the town who also kept the key to the church. We then drove on to Venice for a few days before our final farewell to Bella Italia. And to think it all started with a lovely conversation with "Friends of Roman Cats " and a simple raffle ticket Click here for a printable PDF copy of this brochure