Alyssa, Shelby, Sherri, Michelle, Me, and Whitney on top of the Duomo.
At the crack of dawn on Thursday, we began a whirlwind tour through Tuscany. We took a high-speed train from Roma Stazione Termini to Florence, where we spent the rest of Thursday and Friday. Florence was nice, but incredibly touristy. I am pretty sure I heard more English in my two days in Florence than I’ve heard in the rest of the month and a half I’ve been in Italy. We got to see palaces, a science museum from the 19th Century, churches aplenty, and famous works of art (Mom, I did see Leo, but I didn’t get to say hi, as he was a bit busy at the time), and we even got to climb to the top of the Duomo and see Florence from above.
On Saturday, we left Florence for Siena, but along the way, we stopped in the medieval town of San Gimignano, the “Manhattan of the Middle Ages.” It was amazing! We got off the bus near a supermarket and had to climb the hill, but at the top, we were greeted by imposing stone walls and a skyline of towers and clay-tiled roofs. I climbed the tallest tower (54 meters tall, built in 1311) with a couple of the girls, and I was able to admire some truly beautiful views of the Tuscan countryside. And I got a gelato from what is officially the best gelateria in the world (this place actually did win the world championships for gelato from 2006-2009). After San Gimignano, we went to another medieval village, this one named Monteriggioni. Like San Gimignano, this town is surrounded by stone walls, but the wall of this one forms a sort of crown around the top of the hill. This town was pretty neat, but San Gimignano was definitely cooler.
Siena was nice as well. Siena is also where the Monty Python bit comes into play. Il Palio is a horserace that takes place in the Piazza del Campo in July and August every year. Jockeys from each of Siena’s highly competitive neighborhoods don period dress and ride bareback at breakneck speeds around the piazza. To give you an idea of how hardcore this race is, I’ll just point out that both riders and horses are blessed by a priest before the race, and that a horse is not required to have its rider at the end to win. In tribute to Il Palio di Siena, Sherri, Michelle, Whitney and I (Shelby filmed the whole affair – and apparently giggled about it) held a short race of our own:
We spent the last part of Saturday, as well as Sunday morning in Siena, wandering back and forth across the old part of town. On Sunday, we left to head back to Rome by bus, but along the way, we had two more stops to make. First was Pienza, where we saw a church and wandered around taking pictures from the walls, and then came Montepulciano, where we saw what I think is my favorite church to date. After that, it was a couple more hours of driving through the Tuscan countryside and then the suburbs of Home Sweet Rome.
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