The Best Laid Plans

Though initially PB and I had planned to take a day trip to Cinque Terre yesterday and hike a few trails, when we were still at supper on Saturday night at 11pm we decided that we would not want to try to make a 6am flight, and so we scrapped Cinque Terre and ended up out at the Boboli Gardens. I had not seen Palazzo Pitti or the gardens during my previous trip to Florence and was a bit indignant that we each were required to pay 10 Euro to enter, as my experience with European gardens was limited to those at Luxembourg and thus free. We frolicked around the area for a while, taking silly pictures and even wandering through a costume display in the Palazzo Pitti (we stumbled upon it while trying to find the bathrooms); unfortunately, our main goal, to find a statue of a guy on a horse coming out of some body of water, was never accomplished. I believe we searched every body of water in the gardens to no avail.

For lunch we had thought we would get fruit and bread from one of the smaller shops along the alleys in Oltrarno, but since it was Sunday most things were closed, and we figured we would just head back up to Fiesole again for more quiet and fewer tourists. We munched waffles with Nutella on the way to the bus stop and rode a noisy number 7 bus (the Georgetown students have just started at the Villa and were coming back from their first Florence excursion) up to the front of J.J. Hill. Fiesole was more of the same from the morning: we walked around taking silly pictures and pausing occasionally to head into the few stores that were open.

Eventually we made our way back to Santa Maria Novella, where we caught the 4:19 train to Milan and spent the night – nothing new eventful was seen or experienced, though we did spend quite a bit of time wandering around the Piazza Duomo trying to find a restaurant called the “Bistrot Duomo”. After much questioning of the locals, it was finally determined that the restaurant was, in fact, closed for renovations, and so we just had a repeat visit of “Quattro Mori”.

This morning we head back to the Malpensa airport to get on a flight to Atlanta and return to real life, which reminds me that I have still not written about the first day in Milan. DB and I had about half a day, during which we explored the Duomo, Il Cenacolo, and the Castello Sforzesco. The Duomo, which is supposedly the third largest in some region (the world? Italy? I am not sure), was pretty awesome, since we got to walk all the way up on the roof of it and see over Milan; The Last Supper, though, was obviously the highlight of the trip. In fact, we even happened to go in with a tour group who had a guide well-versed in all matters of the painting and learned more about it than expected.

Off to the airport now – Ciao!