The travels of Tim and Megan: October 2011

Wednesday: Travel to Italy

As was the case with Slovenia, we had been to Italy before and we had seen all the major sites and attractions. So we planned to have a relaxing, quiet time in Italy and visit some of the smaller towns and see a bit of countryside this time around. After the train, bus, train combo to Bologna, we caught yet another train the short distance to the town of Modena. The original plan had been to spend a day or two in Bologna, but there was some major event or conference on there and we could not get accommodation at all. So we opted to stay in nearby Modena, which gave us the option of seeing Bologna during the day. As it turned out, with our delay in leaving Slovenia, we did not bother with Bologna at all.

We arrived in Modena in the evening on Wednesday, checked into our accommodation and set off to explore the town centre. We were starving and really just wanted to sit down and have dinner, even though it was quite early. We walked around and around town for ages without any luck - there were plenty of cafes, some of which served slices of pizza, but we just could not find any restaurants that were open. We eventually found one and they told us that they would not be opening until 7pm, another 30 minutes away. So we waited until 7pm, very hungry, and eventually got dinner. Who knew it was so hard to find food in Italy! Dinner was very good, however. We had bread, red wine, spaghetti bolognese for Megan and some other pasta dish for Tim, rounded off with a shared tiramisu for dessert. Very nice.

Thursday: Lucca

We caught a train to Lucca on Thursday morning. This actually involved catching three separate trains - from Modena back to Bologna, then a train to Lucca, with a connection in Prato. We only just made it to the connecting train in Prato, which was lucky, otherwise the journey would have taken even longer. We arrived in Lucca at 1.30pm and there were no taxis anywhere, so we walked into the centre of town. Actually we wandered aimlessly for a while, hoping to find a taxi. Eventually we found one and it took us to the hostel. It was a hot day and we were sick of trains and travel. We had lunch at a cafe and then explored the pretty town centre of Lucca.

Lucca is a small city in the Tuscany region in central Italy. It was founded by Etruscans and became a Roman colony in 180BC. It is famous for its intact Renaissance-era city walls. We spent the afternoon wandering the pretty (and busy) streets inside the city walls of Lucca. We found the town to be much prettier and more lively than Modena. There were plenty of busy squares, one of which had dozens of market stalls (selling crap) in the centre, and a large church and bell tower on one side. Another of the main squares was completely surrounded by buildings, which curved around to form an oval-shaped courtyard or square in the centre. It was really cool.

We checked out some shops and the obligatory church or three, had some gelato, and then ended up having a drink at a cafe in the oval-shaped square. We then negotiated the maze of streets once more and found a good place for dinner, where we had bread and oil, lasagne/pasta and Italian wine. Good solid dinner. Then we had a long walk back to the hostel and crashed in the rather uncomfortable beds.

Friday: Siena

We had booked train tickets to Siena for Friday morning, so we got up and checked out of the hostel and headed down to the train station. It was another three-leg journey, with changes in Pisa and Empoli before we finally arrived in Siena. We had heard that Siena was a beautiful place and we really wanted to go there more than anywhere else. It did not disappoint, we loved it. So we ended up staying there for five days, which had the added bonus of not packing up and catching trains again for a while!

Siena is a city in Tuscany, with a population of around 55,000 people (plus a billion tourists)! The historic centre of Siena has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. The city is famous for its art, museums, cuisine, medieval cityscape and the Palio, which is a horse race held in the main square twice yearly.

After dropping our luggage off in the Piccolo Palio Hotel, we headed out to find a laundromat, so we could do some much needed washing. We found a really good one on the other side of the Piazza del Campo (main square), so we put the washing on and then had lunch at the trattoria next door while we waited. After lunch, with clean clothes again, we walked around the beautiful town centre of Siena, did some blogging at an internet cafe and enjoyed the hot, sunny weather.

In the evening, we had dinner at a place called Zest Wine Bar and Cafe. Megan had read about it and it had been highly recommended. It was fantastic. We had the usual - bread and olive oil and delicious red wine, followed by lasagne (Tim) and beef salad (Megan) and insanely good chocolate cake and custard tart for dessert. We gave it an A+.

Just along the street from the restaurant there was a massive gathering of locals celebrating some special occasion. They all wore a scarf (or carried a flag) with a crest depicting a goose. We later discovered that Siena was historically divided into 17 different neighbourhoods or districts, known as the 17 contrade of Siena. The contrade were set up in the Middle Ages as a form of military defence of Siena. As time has gone on, the contrade have lost their military and administrative functions and have instead become areas of localised patriotism and the contrade race against each other in the twice annual Palio horse race. They each have a crest, usually depicting an animal.

Apparently six of the contrade have gradually died out, but the remaining 11 are still going strong. You can see their flags flying proudly in their different areas of Siena. The goose contrade was obviously celebrating some sort of special goose occasion. It was pretty cool.

Saturday: Siena

We had a fairly lazy day on Saturday. After a big sleep in, we had croissants and fruit from a bakery near the hotel and then we walked along the main street and into the Piazza del Campo, the main public square in Siena. It is a huge shell-shaped space that slopes downwards towards the majestic Palazzo Pubblico (town hall), complete with a very tall bell tower, called the Torre del Mangia. The outskirts of the piazza are lined with cafes, bars and souvenir shops. We carried on wandering the streets of Siena, discovering new pockets of the town as we went.

Megan had booked us in to a wine and food tasting course from 1.30pm to 3pm in the afternoon. It was really good, although it was full of American "gap year" students, so there were a lot of painful and just plain stupid questions/conversations. We tasted bread and olive oil, various hams and salami (including wild boar salami), various cheeses (including cheese made from sheep milk) and a selection of cakes and biscuits. The wine was brilliant. We tasted a sparkling wine, a white wine, two reds and a dessert wine, all from the Tuscany region. They were all really good, but we particularly liked one of the reds. It was really interesting learning about the region and the particular types of foods and wines that go well together.

After the tasting course, we grabbed some supplies from the supermarket and checked out a bit more the town centre to round out the afternoon. We had dinner at a restaurant just off the Piazza del Campo, but it was pretty ordinary.

Sunday: Siena

Sunday was another very lazy day, as it should be. Certain parts of Europe (such as France and Italy) just don't really do anything on Sundays. You can hardly find any shops open at all - even the supermarkets are closed. Luckily we had prepared well and picked up some food the day before. So after a lengthy sleep-in, we had a picnic brunch in a little park not far from our hotel. We had juice, bread with meats and cheeses and some chocolate croissants (which we got from the only bakery in Italy that was open on Sunday)!

We went up to the impressive Siena Cathedral - built between 1215 and 1263 - and got some photos of that and other sights around town. We didn't go inside the cathedral, as that involved queuing for a ticket, and we were just too lazy for that sort of carry on. The rest of the day involved very little - a walk through town, a nana nap back at the hotel, a bit of internet (we followed Vettel's dominant performance at the Singapore Grand Prix - love it). We got a very cheap and easy dinner of some takeaway pizza slices and coke. Solid.

Monday: San Gimignano

On Monday morning, we got going early and bought bus tickets to the little hilltop town of San Gimignano. We had some time to kill before the bus left, so we went to the pinnacle of Italian efficiency, the post office. We needed some stamps for postcards - very simple you would think. They have a helpful ticket system, where you push the button and get a numbered ticket and then wait until your ticket is called. We waited for a few minutes and our number got called and we went up to the window, where the woman said, rather rudely, "No stamps here. Go to the other end." Of course, only some of the post office tellers are able to issue stamps!

So we had to push a different button and get a different coloured ticket and wait at the other end of the long row of tellers. We waited and waited. After about 20 minutes, our number finally got called and after some more fluffing about, the woman informed us that it would cost 2 euros per postcard, so 6 euros in total. That's almost three times the cost of stamps in the UK, which is hardly the bargain basement store of international stamps. So we flagged the stamp idea and left.

The bus ride to San Gimignano took about 1 hour and 20 minutes and the scenery was quite nice in parts. It was another very hot day, approaching 30 degrees when we arrived in San Gimignano at about 11.30am. San Gimignano is a small walled medieval hill town, which was founded in the 3rd century BC. It is a beautiful place - there were still a lot of tourists, but it was not as busy as Siena. It did not take long for us to walk right through the town, stopping in lovely little shops and admiring the pretty squares, fountains and a church as we went. All around the outskirts of the walled town, there were magnificent views of Tuscan countryside - rolling green hills, vineyards and other tiny villages dotted about on the hills.

We had a glass of wine outside a bar, sitting in the sunshine, which was almost too hot! We then grabbed some pizza for lunch and popped into a wine/chocolate shop, where we bought some wine and chocolate - bet you didn't see that one coming! At about 2.30pm, we caught the bus back to Siena. Megs was lucky enough to make a friend - a strange old American man who asked a lot of stupid questions. Tim pretended to be deaf to avoid having to join in the fun. Usually the weirdos pick Tim, so it made for a nice change!

We got back to Siena just before 4pm and we walked to a nice patch of grass just in front of little neighbourhood church, where we had a bottle of wine in the evening sun. Megs continued her fine day of attracting weirdos, as an old woman from the area came and sat right next to her, started cuddling her and jibbered away to us in Italian for about 15 minutes. Quite special. That aside, it was a lovely warm evening and it was so peaceful at that spot. We had dinner at a place near our hotel, which was, again, only average. Probably 6/10, but not what we had hoped for.

Tuesday: Siena

We got sorted and checked out of the Piccolo Palio Hotel and had a delicious breakfast in the Piazza del Campo, sourced from a new bakery we had discovered. Several tour groups came and went as we sat in the square with our breakfast. Most were American and very loud. We were moving on to Assisi later in the day, so it was another very lazy, relaxed day. We visited the internet cafe and managed to get quite a few admin jobs done - booking flights and hotels, emails, a bit of blog.

Later in the morning, we walked back to the Piazza del Campo and had an extremely expensive soft drink at a cafe looking onto the square. Prime real estate! We had awesome pizza for lunch from a great little takeaway pizzeria we had found a few days earlier. In the afternoon, we stumbled upon Santa Domenica Basilica and had a look inside. It was very large and empty (hardly any seats!) but there were some beautiful paintings and sculptures around the edges and some very modern stained glass windows, which were worth a look. We rounded out our time in Siena with some gelato and then we made our way to the bus station, where we caught an extremely new and modern bus to Assisi. We left Siena at 5.15pm and we arrived in Assisi just after 7.00pm. Not bad.

We were quite tired by the time we checked into our hotel, so we grabbed dinner at the restaurant underneath the hotel and we were not disappointed. It was the best food we had had for a while and quite reasonably priced too. We were also impressed with our hotel room - it had an excellent bathroom, which made a nice change!

Wednesday: Assisi

We felt we had earned a massive sleep-in, so that's precisely what we had on Wednesday morning. The window shutters are very effective at keeping sunlight out, so it is actually quite easy to sleep late in Italy!

Assisi is a town in the Umbria region (south-east of Tuscany). It was the birthplace of St Francis (of Assisi), who founded the Franciscan religious order in the town in 1208, and of St Clare, the founder of the Poor Sisters. The 19th century Saint Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows was also born in Assisi. The town is long and narrow and sits on a hilltop. We were staying at one end of the hill (at the top), so we walked down through the town towards the bottom end to visit the major attraction, the Basilica di San Francesco. We stopped along the way for breakfast in the Piazza del Comune (main square) and admired the Santa Maria sopra Minerva, originally a beautiful Roman temple dating from the 1st century BC, but now a working Catholic church.

We loved Assisi - it was exactly what we thought an Italian town should be like. It was not too big or too small and not too crowded or too empty - just perfect. It has narrow and winding cobbled streets, with the odd moped zipping through, beautiful old stone buildings (some of which are on a lean) with wooden window shutters, and all sorts of interesting shops and eateries.

We made our way down to the Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi's most famous landmark. The Basilica is the resting place of St Francis of Assisi and hosts a multitude of artistic treasures, including some remarkable frescoes detailing the life of St Francis. As regular followers of the blog may know, we have seen a great many churches in our travels and we have maintained that after St Peter's and Westminster Abbey, nothing will ever compete. Well, the Basilica came quite close. We loved that it actually contains two churches, an upper church on top of the lower church, as well as the peaceful tomb of St Francis beneath the lower church. Megan particularly enjoyed the frescoes, including the most well known, which is St Francis "preaching to the birds". They looked a bit like pigeons, so we imagine he was telling them to get lost and let him have his sandwich in peace.

Afterwards we wandered around admiring the views of Umbria from the magnificent courtyard outside the Upper Church, got some pizza for lunch and checked out a few smaller churches and art workshops, of which there are plenty in Assisi. We really liked the Duomo di San Rufino, where visitors can see the original baptismal font where St Francis and St Claire were baptised (making it more than 800 years old), some exposed Roman foundations and some quite breathtaking sculptures and paintings.

Feeling spiritually satisfied, we followed up the Duomo with some red wine on our hotel terrace, before wandering back to the main square where we were entertained by an all female Christian youth choir, led by -wouldn't you know it- a dodgy looking man with an accordion. We managed to capture a couple of photos and even a bit of video footage on the blackberry - you just can't beat that sort of entertainment!

In the evening we did a wine tasting at a nice wine bar. We tried several different wines from the region. We particularly enjoyed one of the reds, which happened to be a hit with Vladimir Putin and George Clooney. We were lured into buying an additional glass of that one after the tasting had finished (deliciously expensive). We then wound up back at the same restaurant as the night before, which again was excellent. A combination of the red wine and the churches inspired Tim to get a vision of the Last Supper from a row of wine bottles on a shelf. They were arranged with six bottles on either side (apostles, of course) of a stereo speaker (Jesus...spreading the word) you see. Brilliant.

Thursday: Assisi and Rome

We started Thursday with another sunny breakfast in the main square, before beginning the simple task of getting some cash out. However, Italy decided to mess with us. Three ATMs later, we were alarmed by the message "the machine has captured your card, please contact your bank". Disaster! Luckily, the machine promptly spat the card back out again, so perhaps it was a mistake in translation. We spent the few hours before our train to Rome exploring, soaking up some sunshine and getting some lunch. We then rode the public bus down to the train station, which was full of a couple of dozen noisy and excited Italian teenagers. Lucky us.

The train ride to Rome was direct and fairly painless. We arrived in Rome at 4.30pm. Our hostel was conveniently positioned one street back from the main train station in Rome, so it was a great spot to explore the city from. We got settled in and then planned a route to get to Trastevere, where we'd had some excellent meals in the past. Unfortunately, it really was a day for Italy to dump on us. The metro was clearly broken, as the platform was jam-packed and there were no trains in sight - we gave up and spent an hour or so having a drink nearby, waiting for it to fix itself. We then got to the platform again to find it still broken. Almost two hours and four euros down, we resigned ourselves to eating within walking distance of our hostel. Amazingly, we walked for an hour before finding anything that looked halfway decent in our price range, and even then it was distinctly average. Not cool Rome! We were determined to hit up Trastevere the next day.

Friday: Rome

After a brilliant sleep, we got up and checked out of the hostel. Thankfully the metro was working, so we were able to catch a ride across to the western side of Rome, by the Vatican City. As we emerged from the metro station and walked towards St Peter's, we were pretty much mobbed by people trying to sell us tickets, give us information or get us through some secret passage to avoid the massive queues to the Vatican Museums and St Peter's Basilica. They just couldn't understand that we were not interested in seeing the Sistine Chapel. Been there, done that, loved it, but no need to re-do it this time around.

We walked into the massive square in front of St Peter's (the Piazza San Pietro) and stood and admired the massive and beautiful basilica - one of our favourite sights in the world. The queue to get into the basilica was at least 150 metres long. Insane.

After a couple of photos, we crossed the border back into Italy (te he he) and carried on walking along the river towards the district of Trastevere. Trastevere is packed with brilliant restaurants, cafes and bars, amongst lovely little squares and it is relatively tourist free. We arrived around midday and found a nice looking place, where we sat down and did not move for almost three hours. We had a perfect long Italian lunch, sitting outside in the sun.

We had all of our favourites - bread and olive oil, beautiful red wine, ham and cheese, green salad, spaghetti carbonara and cakes for dessert. We rolled out of the restaurant and headed east, across the river, past the Roman Forum and to the metro station. After picking up our luggage, we caught the train out to the Rome Fiumicino airport. We got there really early (as we had allowed for transport meltdowns, which did not materialise), so we had a long wait at the airport. We had some drinks and dinner and got rid of our last euros. We were excited to be heading back to London to catch up with some folks and we were excited to be leaving the pushy and loud Italians!

That signalled the end of our six week tour through eastern and central Europe. We had an absolute ball. After a short break break in London, we would be flying to Kenya to begin a two-month safari tour of Africa. These are very exciting times.

Country tally:
Megan - 54
Tim - 50
Bear - 50