Florence & Siena

It is a treat for the senses. Waking to the sound of church bells, but with no idea which of the many churches they may be coming from. It isn’t quite a case of a church on every corner, but perhaps it is every other corner.

Looking out of the windows in the breakfast room of the hotel there is the Duomo. A sight you get to see from almost anywhere in the city. Looming over the rooftops, or appearing through any gap between buildings at seemingly every turn into any street.

But there are other domes, there are other spires, bell towers, and there are other churches decorated on their facades with the same black and white marble stripes of Il Duomo, although for the others it is just the front façade, and not the whole of the exteriors of those churches.

What we don’t really hear is traffic. Much of the old centre of the city is nominally pedestrianised, which obviously doesn’t stop white van drivers, taxi drivers, Deliveroo muppets on motorised bicycles, or scooters from meandering their way around the narrow streets and alleyways. But the constant drone of cars is not something you hear. There are the sirens of one the many different types of police zooming around the city to their next showdown. Or lunch.

It is a medieval city; any straight roads are there purely by accident. There is no grid here. Narrow and winding is the de facto order of the day (and the night). Pavements are narrower, and often disappear completely. I don’t know why anyone would want to try and drive around the old centre of the city.

They do love a piazza here. Stick a fountain or two in the middle, throw up a couple of statues, line the outside of the piazza with cafes, bars, and restaurants, and even in early February you can sit outside and watch the world go by as the pigeons and sparrows vie enviously for a chance to nip in and claim that crumb which has fallen from your feeding onto the uneven stones of the pavement below.

We were lucky with the weather in Florence. It wasn’t cold as it might be in an area where you can see the mountains in distance all around. Overnight rain tended to have stopped before we left the hotel for the day. Showers during the day considerately only came and went whilst we were inside some wonderful building or other, and it was only the wet slabs on the ground which indicated the rain had been at all once we had emerged from whichever visual overload location, we had been in to see.

You could be in Florence for a month and only really scratch the surface of all there is to see and do.

Art galleries, palaces, churches, architecture, gardens, piazzas, the river, the bridges, and then even more of the same on the other side of the river.

So much to see, too little time to be able to take everything in. Try, and you’ll just end up in an overloaded vegetative state. We had to pick and choose, not go mad, not try to cram in as much as possible just to say we’ve seen that. We went inside the Uffizi, Il Duomo (and it’s baptistry), the Giotto, the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens, and Santa Croce. But that was it, anything else we saw it was from the outside.

Which on the whole applied to shops as well. It there is a piazza then you may well find a market in it at some point during the week. And the central market has more stalls around it out on the street than it does inside. Florence and fashion may well go together, after all, all the high-end, well-known names have stores here. The markets have the lower end and the tourist tat. But it is not just the fashion, it is the leather goods, and the perfume. The number of perfumeries is off the scale, but pales in comparison to the leather goods. Wallets, bags, clothes, key rings, luggage, in natural shades of tan, or dyed any colour you might be able to think of, and quite a few you probably can’t.

And yet despite it being a local industry, so many of the stall and stores aren’t run by Italians. You are more likely to hear snatches of Arabic from north Africans, or Hindi, Urdu, or Bengali from the Indian sub-continent as they talk amongst themselves, only breaking out into Italian or English depending on where they think their next mark is from as you approach. It was a surprise to see the same in a lot of the restaurants as well.

Ah, the food. I don’t understand how anyone could say they don’t like Italian food. Granted, if I lived there, I’d probably be about forty stone and dead within a few months. But we didn’t have a bad meal, or even anything approaching average on the trip. It was all great. Topped off by the early Valentine’s meal we went for at Degustna. A fine place on little more than an alley off a back street not far from the Uffizi. I’m by no means a foodie, not in any way shape or form, so much so that this Michelin star applicant was so different from what I usually go for, that the tasting menu we had would automatically fill the top five places of the poshest meals I’ve ever had. It was all exquisite, but well outside of my comfort zone.

Whilst in Florence I did manage to stack it, trying to avoid a gamut of oncoming tourists and locals returning home from work, I misjudged which were the kerb and which were the gutter stones and so stepped off the kerb, wasn’t expecting the extra drop and went down like a sack of spuds. The camera lens cap did its job, springing off but protecting the lens from contact with anything hard and unwieldy, which was a good job seeing as it was only day two. The passersby were all very concerned and helpful and even a passing police car stopped to make sure I was OK (and probably to check I wasn’t drunk). It was on the way to climb the 414 steps of the Giotto, which I managed probably just on adrenaline.

We had chosen a time slot which meant we would be at the top whilst the day turned to night, and the lights of the city came on. So good daylight and twilight shots were taken over the city.

The 414 steps back down were fine, but I was paying the price for the tumble for the rest of the trip, with knees caked in ibuprofen gel, and both ibuprofen and paracetamol thrown in to keep me moving. There’s no way I’d want to miss any of the time there, no matter what.

Not content with Florence we threw in a day trip to Siena. It’s about an hour and a half on the train from Florence, but once there the signage to get to the medieval city centre isn’t clear and it took nearly as long again to make it from the train station to the city. Granted we stayed on the bus too long thinking it was going to go into the centre, only for it to veer off into the Tuscan countryside, so we needed to come back the other way, and it was fortunately only a few minutes to wait, and the one going to other way took us right into the ancient centre.

So close that when we got off, it was a case of turn two corners and we were in the famous central piazza. And what a sight it is. It was virtually empty as well. The hordes of tourists in Florence weren’t making it out this far.

The piazza it the backdrop for the spectacular opening of the Bond film ‘Quantum of Solace,’ but fortunately for us there are no horses pounding around it dressed in the colours of the founding families.

I’ve mentioned the antiquity and the narrow streets and almost unchanged centre of Florence, but Siena takes that and doubles it, or quadruples it. As a city state it was conquered by Florence in the sixteenth century, and Florence promptly stopped Siena from building anymore, and so the old city of Siena sits like a time capsule of what it was then.

We wandered the narrow streets which twist and turn so you never quite know where you are, and you get to a junction, or a side alley and there is a steep rise or fall off it. The ways these ancient streets are built on such steeps hillsides is a wonder of their age.

A visit to the cathedral gives us a ticket for five sites around it.

Opposed to the almost austere interior of Il Duomo in Florence, the cathedral in Siena is a rich tapestry of decoration and decadence.

The museum houses treasures and leads out to the old walls of the complex. There is a tower in the central piazza which takes the 414 steps of the Giotto and raises them up another 150, but thankfully for my knees, it wasn’t open to tourists to climb up. However the hundred or so steps up through the museum and out onto the walls, set on higher ground means we get the views out over the city and the surrounding countryside that are as good or better than we might have gotten there. And with the added bonus of including the tower.

We did make it down as well, going into the crypt of the cathedral, but not another couple of layers down to where the baptistry and treasury sit.

Instead we are meandering back towards the central piazza when there are the first drops of rain, we make it to a bar opposite the tower and it’s minute little balcony seats, covered by overhanging awnings, just in time to sit and watch the torrential downpour stream down in front of us and rush down the sloped piazza.

And when the rain stops it is time to make our way back to the train station and get the train back to Florence. We are met with an overly officious ticket inspector. Unknown to us, all tickets have to be validated in a little green machine by the side of the platform before getting on the train. We hadn’t had an issue with it on the way out, and despite the fact it was impossible to have got from Florence to Siena, back to Florence, back to Siena and then be on this train, that is in effect what he was accusing us of and then acted like he was doing us a favour with a five Euro fine each and not the fifty he was showing on his machine. I’m sure that just went straight into his own pocket.

He, and the stroppy mare in the airport café on the way home were the only people we met who weren’t friendly on our trip. Everyone else couldn’t be helpful enough. It was a great trip, and it is another place that given infinite time and money we’d love to return to.

A couple of observations though of other people whilst we were there.

In the gift shop at Santa Croce, there are some young female American tourists, and they are asking for the items they have bought (rosaries and other adornments) to be blessed. The lady serving says she will find someone, and is lucky as a male is walking through the shop to go up the stairs in the corner marked as staff only. The lady announces, ‘this is Father Francis, the Franciscan priest.’ I’m not sure who looks more surprised at this announcement, him, or me. He is not dressed as a priest would be, and has no hint of a cross, but after a pause he comes and he says some words in Latin over the assorted purchases before heading back off to wherever he was going, and the tourists seem happy. However the cynic in me thinks it may not have been a priest at all.

Breakfast in the hotel is, erm, entertaining is probably the best word for it. Some people do have some strange serving methods (even if we ignore the fact that there is pizza on the buffet. For breakfast!). There is the one guest who takes a coffee cup, fills it halfway up with yoghurt, and then fills the rest of it with Coco Pops. And those who like to drink their milk out of prosecco glasses. Then there are the instagrammers, taking pictures of their food at the breakfast table at an angle to get the dome of the church in. Lots of plates of food, of which they ate about one percent. And the really funny thing was the dome they were getting in their photos wasn’t the one of the Duomo, that was viewable from a different window! There were trainee vampires in the hotel as well, getting the blinds to be shut so people couldn’t see the Duomo because it was too bright for them. Foremost amongst these was the oriental woman walking around with a large plate in front of her face. There is no accounting for people.

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[embed]onetruekev I have two books published on Amazon. Where the lights shine brightest The man has recurring dreams of blinding lights…www.onetruekev.co.uk