RtW Day 30: Tuscany

I've left Florence now and am now writing this out in my crappy little hotel in Venice. Internet is only accessible from downstairs though and costs a fortune so I'm not sure when I'll be posting this. Before I go out and see what Venice has to offer though I thought I'd write a little about Florence and the rest of Tuscany.

Florence

You might remember the tour I mentioned in my last RtW post. I had a reservation for Monday morning but got the times mixed up resulting in my missing the bus. Thankfully, I didn't pay anything for the trip or I would have been pretty pissed. It's probably better that I didn't go though 'cause I'd stayed up too late the night before watching Veronica Mars and was operating on just a few hours of sleep that day.

Due to the above, I didn't do much of anything that day. I walked around town, read some Harry Potter in the park and did some more laundry. Later that night I went out for gelato with a couple of girls from Bath and had a very nice time chatting about where we've been, and how great Bath is etc.

All was not lost on the bus tour though. If I couldn't make the Thursday run, I could still make it to the Monday tour, and so I booked another seat on the bus and took the following day to see David and the Pitti Palace. The line to see David was pretty short, as I was smart enough to hit in the morning, but the 10€ price tag was generally unwelcome. However, it was worth it. David is a brilliant work of art, well worth all of the fanfare it receives. No pictures were allowed however so you'll either have to take my word for it or go check it out yourself :-)

The Pitti Palace on the other hand will have to remain a mystery to me though. The palace, built by the Pitti family in an act of ego to best the Medicis was quite beautiful on the outside, but as it housed a museum within, cost 9€ to enter. Similarly, they massive gardens behind the palace were an additional 9€ and balking at the price, I chose to skip it. I'm sure there are pictures somewhere on the Internet.

That night, after chatting with the other hostel-folk and listening to the city's reaction when Florence beat Rome at a rugby game (you could hear the cheers from every window in the city), I was smart enough to try to get to sleep early and woke up with plenty of time to try and find the bus for the Tuscany tour. Turns out that I needed it 'cause it wasn't where I thought it would be, but I found it anyway. Our first stop was to be Sienna.

Sienna

Sienna's a tiny town with beautiful architecture and a long, rich history. Our tour stopped there first and then our guide walked us through town describing the way the city works. First of all, the city is broken down into (I think) 17 districts. Each district is named after an animal and is decorated as such as you move from district to district. Babies born to families living in that district become part of that district for life and even retain that membership if they move to another area and marry someone of a different district. So for example, a boy born in the goose neighbourhood can move to the rhino neighbourhood, then meet a tortoise girl and move to the Aquila district where they have a kid of their own. The boy will always be a goose, the girl will always be a tortoise and the baby will forever be an Aquilla.

Why do they bother with these distinctions then? Because while there's not much of a social divide between districts, they are competitive. Every year, there's a horse race in the centre of town: 17 horses and jockeys for 17 districts. Winner gets bragging rights for the year and there is, of course lots of partying.

Sienna's hospital has an equally interesting history. Apparently, it used to be so common for people to abandon their babies that the Santa Maria D'Alla Scalla hospital created a special system in which to accept the children. People could drop off the kids in a little half-cylindrical box built into the wall of the hospital, rotate the box to bring the kid inside which would then ring a bell and tell the hospital workers that there was a new baby at the door. As the children were often abandoned without names, any child being raised there would then be given the surname "D'Alla Scala" or just "Scala". The name is kinda popular in Italy nowadays.

The hospital is also host to the most beautiful painting I've seen yet and I don't even know what it's called and I wasn't allowed to take pictures. I just sat there for a good 15minutes looking at it: floor to ceiling, behind the altar... it was just plain pretty.

Lunch on the Farm

The next leg of our trip found us at a farm house about 45min outside of Sienna. The bus pulled up to a tiny little house on a massive acreage of olive trees and grape vines on top of a hill overlooking the rural countryside. Have you ever seen Under the Tuscan Sun? Well it was just like that. Lunch included pasta with fresh ingredients, bread, cheese and meat as well as salad and wine. The wine and olive oil were organic, picked and bottled on-site. The olive oil was very good, but the wine still tasted like vinegar to me. I tried all three: red, white and a desert wine with almond biscuts.

San Gimignano

A medieval town complete with huge city walls and lookout towers, San Gimignano is really just a tiny town in a sea of the Tuscan countryside. It was host however to a little ice cream shop that supposedly won an award as part of "Team Italia" in the world gelato championships. They claim to be the best in the world, so I had to have some... I can't say that it was any more impressive than anything else to be honest :-)

The city also seems to think that toilet seats are not required... ever. That's all I'm going to say about that.

Pisa

You may have heard this from other people, but I'll just repeat it for those who weren't listening. Pisa is lame. There's nothing there except an overpriced cathedral and the leaning tower. The rest is just sprawling suburbs. I got a couple good pictures of the tower though, and some dirt for my Mom's collection. We didn't have a hell of a lot of time there and climbing the tower was 15€ so I didn't try to make the trip.

And that's about it for Tuscany. My hostel, "Emerald Fields" was fabulous. Antonio, the caretaker there was super-awesome and friendly and the people I met there were also really nice. If you're going to Florence, you should really check them out.

I have a few more things I want to say about Florence, but they don't really belong here. I should have put them in my first Florence post, so I'll edit that one instead. I'm going to go downstairs now and see what's involved in posting this stuff online. Expect my next long post to be about Venice :-)