Colorado Cruiser: Italy Day 4 Florence and Siena

Time to leave Roma.

It’s sure bitter sweet. It feels like we barely got here and have hardly seen anything. Got to everything we wanted except the Borghese museum which requires reservations. Our concierge was trying to get them for us yesterday and the main reason we came back from Ostia Antica. But they were booked solid.

We were up by 6:30, packed and out the door by 7:30. We grabbed a simple breakfast at the train station, then waited for our train to start boarding. The train was a high speed train going in excess of 100mph and took us straight to Florence (spelled Firenze here).

I borrowed Mike’s laptop and wrote the day 2 trip report while gawking at the scenery. Mike just gawked. We saw hundreds of small farms and vineyards across the country side. But about 1/3 of the trip we rode through fog and couldn’t see much at all. We talked about people who say they’d love to retire to Tuscany, but neither of us could see exactly what the real charm was. It looked beautiful, but not that much more beautiful than any rural agricultural area in the states.

We did see many hilltop villages and a few castles along the way as well, but when you’re going that fast, you don’t get to see them for long. We arrived in Florence in about 2 hours, and then had to figure out where the bus or taxi queue was in relation to this train station. The hotel recommended bus 1, but we never did find it, so we took a taxi out.

My big contribution to the trip was to use RCI timeshare points to get the Florence hotel. It is a simple hotel about a mile out of city center so we grabbed a cab. It’s much smaller than the Marriott, so no more roof top breakfasts for us.

We asked the desk clerk if it was a non smoking room and he shrugged, then said “It is non smoking for Europe. If you see ash tray, we come take it away”.

We squeezed ourselves and our luggage in the tiny elevator and headed up to the 2nd floor.

The real goal for the day was to take a train to Siena, so we just unpacked a few things then headed back down. The desk clerk showed us on a map and told us that it was only a 15 minute walk. It took us over 35 minutes to get back to the station, and we had very little time left. It took another few minutes to find an unused ticket machine, then we had to find platform 4.

I was suddenly reminded of Harry Potter. We could see platform 2 on one side of a building, and platform 5 on the other side. I wondered if we had to aim for the building between the two, close our eyes and run.

We finally saw the sign saying that platforms 3 and 4 were on the other side of the building. With burning lungs, we made a desperate run down the side of the building 50 yards or so, and as we got there, we saw platform 4, and our train about 200 yards away and gaining speed rapidly. I figure we missed it by less than a minute.

So now we had an hour before our next train. It wasn’t too bad since the first thing we had planned in Siena was to get lunch. Now we’d just have lunch in Florence before catching our train. First we needed to see if we could exchange our tickets for the next train. It turns out they are good for 24 hours. Now we only had 45 minutes left before the next train, and where could we go to, get lunch, and be back in time to catch our train??? What follows is a world changing experience. The ground shook and foodies all over the world rolled over in their graves.

Mike and I went into the station McDonalds and got value meals.

I do that all the time, but this was only the 2nd time in 20 years that I’ve known Mike to eat at MickeyD’s. It was such an event that I took a photo which I promised not to send to his friends at work.

Needless to say, we were in plenty of time to catch the next train.

This ride was no 100 mph sleek train with assigned seating. It stopped at every little town on the way but left us plenty of time to see the towns and read a bit about Siena.

From the Sienna train station we took a taxi up into town rather than trying to do the “short brisk walk” as the guidebook put it. It was steep and long enough that I’m very glad we skipped that part. The taxi let us out in a busy square and pointed to a long stream of people heading down through a passage way.

As we got close, we saw the first glimpse of Piaza del Campo. It included the town hall and the huge square in front of it. I haven’t seen the newest James Bond film, but I understand that part of it was filmed here during a horse race held in the plaza each year. So if you’ve seen the movie, you should have an idea of what we were seeing (minus the horses, jockeys, massive crowds, explosions, gun shots, and film crew).

There were people sitting throughout the plaza. Some were eating lunch, some were sleeping, and some just looked exhausted. All we had done all day was ride trains, but I too could have had a quick nap about then.

We fiddled trying to get a decent shot of the square, the hall and us. We weren’t alone in that attempt. Every few seconds someone else would walk right to where we were and try to take the same shot. It was a popular place.

It had been a couple of hours since lunch, so we decided to buy gelatos and enjoy the view for a while. Sienna doesn’t have the same emphasis on gelaterias as Rome and I suppose this lack results in a smaller selection. There were only half as many flavors to choose from and the strawberry looked to be sugar based rather than custard based. I was thinking about my kids at the moment, and how my daughters in particular all love coconut so I got coconut gelato rather than my old standby, strawberry. I stood in the center of Sienna watching other dads play with their kids and ate my ice cream.

Sienna’s big attraction is that its population was wiped out one time. That resulted in the city becoming somewhat stagnant which means that the homes and buildings are all very old and look very much like what they did during the Middle Ages.

We left the Piazza del Campo to go to the Duomo. We immediately saw how narrow and scenic the streets and buildings were. There was almost no traffic which was a good thing because there was nowhere for a vehicle to pass us. We walked up to the Duomo and got tickets to do a full tour of the chapel, crypts, and baptistery. Like nearly all churches, this one was in the middle of a restoration with a big crane hovering over it.

We took our photos from the outside then went in. Beautiful paintings – check. Amazing ceilings – check. Stained glass –check. Mosaics of two boys sucking on the breasts of a she wolf – check. Library with ancient sheet music … hey, that’s new.

From the chapel we went half way down the hill to tour the crypts. It’s a large section that was the original church hundreds of years ago. They built a new church literally on top of the old one and then just stopped using it. They also built a baptistery at the bottom of the hill but made it tall enough to mesh with the new church and help hold it up. The result is this large unused space with its original frescos, foundations, doors, and windows that are unchanged for hundreds of years. It was very neat to look down 40 feet behind the baptistery’s back wall and to see how all of the construction was done.

After we left the Duomo we decided to try to see some of the old city without crowds. So we started wandering streets and alleys, and every time we saw a crowd, we turned the other way. There is a lot of graffiti that spoiled the atmosphere, and the power lines running all over the outside of buildings, but the narrow streets, cobble stones, and high walls made it easy to imagine how the streets might have once looked.

We wandered for a few hours this way and found some fountains and small squares to sit and view the countryside. There don’t seem to be any parks in town, probably because of the steepness of the hill the city is on.

We found a small grocery store and bought some cherries to snack on. We sat at a fountain behind yet another church and watched the people going up and down nearby street.

At 7:00, we went back to Piazza del Campo to eat at a restaurant on the square. The whole day has been slightly overcast which made the sky very bright and left the buildings somewhat dulled. It makes taking pictures very hard because the camera keeps trying to adjust for the brightness of the sky and blacks out all of the building details. But as we sat eating our dinner, the sun broke through near the horizon and lit up the Palazzo Pubblico (town hall) with that beautiful golden sunlight. So I took out my tripod and started trying to take pictures. A Swiss couple nearby offered to take some photos for me since the light seemed very fleeting.

The last return train to Florence was scheduled to leave by 9:18, so we started back to the train station a bit early (you can teach old dogs new tricks if you make them eat McDonalds). There was a self propelled diesel car at the station and the conductor told us that if we rode with them, we’d be able to change trains in Empoli and save about 30 minutes on the trip. We jumped at the chance to get back early. The only problem was that the windows were all locked shut and the heaters were on. It was probably only 85 degrees, but it felt sweltering. Changing trains went as planned and we were back early enough to upload photos and get a good rest so we could climb the Duomo in Florence tomorrow.

Mike in a McDonalds