Touring Tuscany

On Wednesday, June 15, we met a tour bus with Walkabout Florence at the Santa Maria Novella train station first thing in the morning. A group bus tour isn't typically my idea of a good time on vacation, but when we decided we didn't want to rent a car in Florence, I knew we needed to find a way to still see some of the surrounding Tuscan towns. Walkabout Florence is the top ranked tour on Tripadvisor and a blog I've read for years also highly recommended their "Florence in a Day" tour, so I felt good about our decision.

Our bus left Florence around 8:30 a.m. and as we left the city, our tour guide, Lavinia, began sharing information about the medieval and renaissance history of Florence and the surrounding towns of Tuscany. Our first stop was Siena, a town a little more than one hour south of Florence. The town is known for its historic horse race, Il Palio. As Lavinia explained to us, this horse race is no joke. The town is divided into 17 districts, and twice a year, 10 districts are chosen to participate in Il Palio. Horses are chosen at random and each district chooses its jockey. But it's the horse that is the hero. All horses enter the church on race day to receive a blessing from the priest. If the jockey falls off during the race, the horse can still win alone. And for the district that wins comes a year's worth of boastful celebrating. You belong to the district you were born in - you can marry across districts, but come race day, you return to the district of your birth. Like, you leave your children with caretakers in the district they were born in, and you go to your district. Hunger Games, you've got nothing on Il Palio.

Grabbing a snack of ricciarelli before hopping back on the bus. 

After Siena, we made our way to the town of San Gimignano, about 45 minutes northwest of Siena. Just outside of town we stopped for lunch at an organic farm that grows olive trees, vineyards and a special breed of cattle. Here, we stopped for a classic rustic lunch accompanied by the farm's wines. Olive oil and garlic bruschetta, penne con bolognese, mozzarella and prosciutto, and cantucci with vin santo for dessert. The beautiful view from our dining room was the quintessential Tuscan postcard view.

 My hair photobombed in a lot of photos. 

Full and sleepy after lunch, we completed the trek to San Gimignano. This walled city has just a few of its iconic medieval towers remaining. It's very picturesque, although with the other tour groups that seemed to flood the city, it felt like a medieval Disney World of sorts. I found myself wondering what the city would feel like at night when all the tourists went home.

From San Gimignano, it was a one and a half hour ride to our final stop, Pisa. All of us were a little sleepy by this point, so most of the ride was spent napping. I had visited Pisa on a previous trip, but it was still fun to go back and do the obligatory Leaning Tower of Pisa pictures with Jonathan. We also enjoyed a pick-me-up coffee before heading back to meet our group. Funny memory - we had been so timely the entire day, but in Pisa we pulled up the rear thanks to yours truly needing a potty break at the last minute. As we jogged up to the trolly train that was taking our group back to our bus parked at the edge of town, Lavinia jokingly yelled, "Come on, Bari, you're holding us up!" ;-)

Back in Florence at 8:30, we relaxed in our room a bit before grabbing a late night pizza and gelato (plus a shot of limoncello that the pizza cashier insisted we enjoy, his treat).

We would recommend the Walkabout Florence "Tuscany in a Day" tour for anyone staying in Florence who doesn't rent a car. It's a jam-packed day, but it offers a good taste of each town and maybe gives you ideas of where you'd like to return on a future trip.

Falling Hard for Florence

You know that part in Pride and Prejudice when Mr. Darcy tells Elizabeth:

I went all Mr. Darcy in Florence. From the minute we began walking around the city, I was smitten. Bewitched.

--

We took a quick 1.5 hour train to Florence on Monday morning. It was in the train station in Rome that we read a headline about the mass shooting in Orlando that weekend. Suddenly, we felt really far yet close to home all at the same time. Our hearts hurt for the news.

The train ride was relaxing - I always wish transportation by train was more of an option in the States. When we got to Florence, we decided we could handle the 10 minute walk to the hotel with our luggage since the rain had held off. Now is a good time to mention how proud I was that we managed to only pack two carry-on suitcases and our own personal item for this trip (ok, so my personal item was a duffle bag...but still!) It's what made moving place to place much less stressful.

We stayed in Hotel Pendini, which has a great location in Piazza della Repubblica near the city center. After we dropped off our things, we picked up our Firenzecards (if you plan to see several monuments/museums in Florence and can splurge a bit for the sake of drastically cutting down your wait time in line, do it! We loved ours.) From there, we just wandered, which was awesome! We instantly admired how clean and walking friendly Florence is. It just felt comfortable right away. Also, while we were visiting, Florence's version of fashion week, Pitti Uomo, was going on, so there were popup bars and lounge areas setup in the streets with fashionable people out and about. It made for fantastic people watching.

We slowly made our way to Piazzale Michelangelo around sunset that evening. It was a 30-minute walk from our hotel, and right before we crossed over the river for the final stretch, hangriness kicked in (definition: the feeling of being hangry). So we stopped for a snack, which ended up being two awesome sandwiches to tie us over until dinner.

The view from the top was as lovely as I remembered from my first, brief visit to Florence. We celebrated our hike up to the top with a small bottle of Prosecco. We did some more great people watching - a guy was being made up to look like Charlie Chaplin, another couple was taking turns taking photos for their fashion blog and everywhere you turned selfie sticks filled the air.

When we walked back from dinner our exhaustion hit hard. My aunt, uncle and cousins would later chuckle at the fact that we walked to the Piazzale (my uncle was planning to drive us the following night). We sat down to dinner in the Piazza de la Repubblica and devoured some mozzarella and pasta before hitting the hay tired, full and happy.