Antico Borgo di Ariano Volterra

For the last couple weeks my Italian culture class has been on and off again because my professor was hospitalized with pneumonia. This week she finally resumed lectures, however we are in a different class room that is literally right across from her apartment so she doesn't have to walk a long way in the cold. And it is getting really cold in Siena right now.

This, unfortunately, means ...

... trees lined the road ahead and at the top of the next hill stood another walled town with thick town towers like a castle. Vilmo pointed to this place and said this was his town called Monticciello. We drove up to the front arch next to construction fencing. He told me that the restaurant just inside the entrance sold his products. This town is known for their big theater performance put on every summer, Vilmo said, and some of his wwoofers performed ...

... room – the Libreria Piccolomini, built to house the ancient books of Ena Silvio Piccolomini, better known as Pius II. This room was magnificent – the walls contained brightly-painted frescoes, and the ceiling was outlined in vivid gold.

After the Duomo, we continued walking around Siena, spending more time snooping through its streets and shops. Late afternoon, after a quick stop-in to an Irish pub (hey, don’t judge us ...

un autre jour, une autre destination! Aujourd'hui, nous somme parties pour Siene. Arrive a siene, nous avons traverse la ville pour y trouver un bureau d'information touristique. une fois la carte de la vile en main, nous somme aller dinner dans un resto, un peu a l'ecart des sites touristiques. Comme dans tout les restorant italien, il y ...

... whatever we wanted from that room... This was at 3pm too, not like we arrived at some weird hour.
The "dorm" was just an apartment with 6 beds in 1 room, a kitchen and 4 beds in the room joined to the kitchen with no door between - check out the photos on facebook.
Glad we booked the cheaper 6 bed dorm and not the more expensive 4 bed!!!
Found out later that day they have another "dorm" downstairs with a 6 bed room and a double bed in ...

... was very limited which is a shame, but we had enough time to sample the gelato and also cecina, which is like a chick-pea pizza without the pizza base – more like a gigantic crepe I guess. Very tasty.

Volterra has escaped some of the tourist crowds that flock to nearby San Gimignano – thanks in part, apparently, to the Psychiatric Hospital which is based there. Sometimes it pays to be ...

... our Athens experience that night. June 11, 2007 The next morning we were up and out of the hotel by 9:00 am to take the metro to the port, Piraeus. The Metro in Athens is much cleaner and seems to be more efficient than Bart, also really cheap! It took us about 35 minutes to get to the port terminal. As we got off we realized we had no idea where we needed to go nor did anyone else we asked initially. So we walked over the over-pass to the port and looked for ships, which were numerous ...

... the train station it was pretty easy to navigate, especially since some of my friends had done it before. I think we left the train station just in time becasue at Firenze they were announcing 3 hour delays for trains going to Rome becasue anti-bush protesters were blocking the tracks. Our hotel was adorable, all of us girls were joking that it was like a brady bunch hotel. It was only a 2 star hotel (we found ...

... Incredibly Beautiful gothic cathedral, and it actually contains the tombs of Michaelangelo, Dante, Galileo, Rossini, and many other Italian (and OF COURSE, Florentine, greats!!) However, the tomb of Dante does not actually contain his remains, as he was exiled from Florence after writing the Divina Commedia and the city has been fighting for years to win the right for him to return to Florence....just a side note, which I learned and totally didn't know before! It is so amazing ...

... the Etruscan Museum was closed. So a wander down towards the prison at Volterra, but not being brave enough to do anything else, we returned to San Gim to recover. Kate had decided she wanted a writing book, so a detour to a large chain supermarket fixed that. Interesting to see how supermarkets are the same, but yet quite different, the world over. We passed a new prison on the drive back. Coming around a bend into a valley, this huge ...