As we were thinking about what we wanted to do on the trip, we knew we wanted to get out of Rome, but we weren’t sure how to do it. I looked into renting a car, but the automatics were very expensive and I can’t really drive a manual – so this figured to be a bad place to learn. Then I looked into the train system. The trains looked all right, but that would limit the places we could see to a certain extent. Also, a lot of times you end of not venturing too far from the train stations. While I was going through these options, I must have come up with 20 different itineraries we could’ve taken. One had us going to Austria and Switzerland, but that seemed to be too much train time for our 7 days here. While I was looking through the trains, I checked on Expedia and they had tours. Most of the tours were day long tours out of Rome, but there were a few that were week-long tours. And then there was 1 tour called a Mini Art Tour which left on Saturday morning, got back Tuesday night and took us to Assissi, Siena, Florence and Venice – all places we wanted to see. It wasn’t too terribly expensive either considering it included transportation, tour guides, hotels (3 star), breakfast and dinner. Although it’s a little against my explorer nature to go along on a tour, Becky convinced me this was the right way to go.
So our tour started at 7:15am just two blocks from our hotel in Rome. We got up early and headed downstairs to check out. I didn’t think the room included breakfast, but apparently it did – so we ate a good breakfast that even included bacon and eggs. We got to the bus pick-up location and met our guide – we still don’t know his name – and he handed us our luggage tags. It was about 30 minutes before we left on our Appian Line bus – there is room for 30 on our bus, but we were a group of ten (plus the guide and driver, Luigi) – a Lebanese married couple (ages 60ish), a Spanish couple who is in the earlier stages of dating (ages 30-33ish), and a group of 4 from Australia – a father, mother (ages early 50s), son Murray (22) and their friend Mark (mid-40s). The Australian group has been on a whirlwind tour of Europe which started with their model airplane contest in Hungary, then took them to a Greek island, then to the South Italy tour, now on our tour, then next to Scotland then finally to Ireland for another model airplane event.
We hit the road in our Appian Line cruiser up a road called Via Salaria (apparently the word salary comes from Latin soldiers who were paid in salt) and took the 2.5 to 3 hour drive to Assissi. Assissi is a small town best known for being the town of St. Francis of Assissi. He was born and is buried there in the cathedral built just after his death (Oct 3, 1226). The town is situated on a hill overlooking a valley that’s now filled with another town. It seems most of the ancient cities were built on hills and the newer towns are built in the valleys below. There was a law passed that no new construction can occur in Assissi – and that law was passed in the 1700s. The cathedral is the first thing you see as you come to the town – we walked up the hill from the bus parking zone into the square in front of it. You enter the lower basilica and after walking through the huge structure you go down a few steps to see St. Francis’s tomb. From there you climb up to another square and then higher to the upper basilica which is also huge. It contains several frescos telling the story of St. Francis’ life. Most churches say you can’t take flash photography inside and I ended up not taking pictures inside. These pictures are of the square in front, the entrance to the lower basilica and the upper basilica.
Our tour guide led us through the church and after that he pointed us down a narrow, cobblestone road to the city center and said to stay on that road or you will get lost. And to meet him back at the Hotel Windsor Savoie at 1pm. There were many small shops along the tiny road, so narrow that it was just barely big enough for a car to go through. We made it to the city center, then turned and went back to find a restaurant. We sat at a charming little restaurant where Becky had a sausage pizza that was pretty much just like a sausage pizza you’d get in the US and I had the steak dinner – which included spaghetti, then a pork chop served with salad where my only dressing choice was olive oil. We enjoyed our time in Assissi – it’s such a quaint old town, and we never would’ve visited it if it weren’t for the tour taking us there.
Next, we had about a two hour drive to Siena which is in Tuscany. Siena is a larger city which a rich heritage from the middle ages. One odd note – the bus had to pay a fee to enter the city, so we had to stop as we came into town before we could go into the inner reaches of the town. We stopped right next to a 40-50 foot wall which was part of the fortress of Siena. This was an imposing wall to scale. We had to walk around the wall to get to the first church we saw there – San Domenico. It was the church that honored Saint Catherine. After she died, they decided to cut her into 200 pieces, so her finger and head are still visible there within the church. Becky did not think that was very cool. All in all the church was in some need of repair and was probably the least impressive church we’ve seen from a design and architecture/paintings inside perspective.
After San Domenico, our tour guide pointed our the Duomo in the center of the town and it was a long ways away. I didn’t realize we were going to walk all the way there, but we did; passing through narrow streets adorned with shops along the way. It had started to rain along our walk and gradually picked up throughout the walk. We made it to the big church which was in celebration mode. There are 17 sections of Siena and twice a year they have a horse race in the center of town to determine the winning section of the town for the year. The race was on the Sunday after we left, but there was a concert at the church the night before the big race, so as we were leaving (in the pouring rain), several cast members were decorated in their bold colors representing their section of the city. There were flags throughout the downtown area representing each section.
After the church, we hurried down towards the city center (I was in sandals and there was rain pouring down the streets, so my feet were miserable now), and fortunately Becky bought us an umbrella before we left so we weren’t totally drenched. Here are pictures of the city center getting ready for the horse race on Sunday:
As we walked back to the bus, the sun finally came out just as we were getting finished with our long walk. From Siena we took the bus over to Florence where we spent the night. We went to dinner in a restaurant in Florence that used to be a jail. We sat by the Lebanese couple and the Australians so we got to know them a little better. The Lebanese couple don’t speak English very well (the tour is primarily done in English) but they do speak French, so the wife would have me serve as her translator throughout a good portion of the day. Frankly my head was spinning with trying to learn Italian, talking to everyone else in English and then trying to understand this soft-spoken woman and translate her French. This ended a long day and we headed off to our 3-star hotel room which was pretty small and had decorations from what must have been the medieval era.
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