A Rainy day in Siena
Trip Start
Sep 25, 2008
1
27
36
Trip End
Ongoing
Siena,
Tuscany,
Italy
Monday, February 23, 2009
As I was preparing to write this I first looked for my pictures from the day, and I couldn't find them anywhere. While we were there we were looking through all my pictures and deleting some and it appears that all my pictures from Siena were deleted by accident. It really is a bummer. Although it rained almost the whole day there, I still got some nice shots. So anyways, I will put some pictures up that I found on the internet so you can get an idea of what Siena looks like.
Despite this sad note, Siena was a really nice place. It is a medieval town, with a gigantic sink shaped square called Piazza del Campo. Every summer they turn it into a horse racing track and hold a huge race. If you saw the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, it is in the first scenes of the movie. Our plan was to spend the day walking around, as it is a fairly small town, but they were dampened by a downpour in the middle of the day. We arrived in the morning and took a bus from the train station of Siena to the historical city. Siena is a hill city, like so many in Italy, and it would have been a long climb up. We basically wandered again. Siena has a really elaborate church. The façade is completely covered with carvings and sculptures. Something else interesting about it is that it is made with mainly pink and green marble, so it was pretty unique. The inside was also amazing. It had tons of pillars of black and white striped marble, plus the floors were all mosaics depicting stories from the Bible. I think theses were my favorite floors I have seen so far. For lunch we got a few snacks from a grocery store that sold many local products. One of the specialties is something called panne forte, which means strong bread. I got some, and really isn't bread-like at all. It comes in a small round shape, it is dark colored, and the outside is all powdered sugar. It basically seems to be a concoction of dried nuts and fruit all being held together by some kind of honey or molasses. It was crazy hard to eat, but it was good.
We also visited a church called Basilica of San Domenico. Inside we saw the head of St. Catherine of Siena as well her thumb and the whip she used on herself. It was pretty creepy. They had her head up in a little box on an altar. You couldn't get that close, but it was still gross. Besides the head it was super plain and bare inside. After this we had coffee at a café alongside the Campo. It was a little pricey, but it was cold and raining. We were able to still sit outside because they had heaters and umbrellas, so it was still nice. I am guessing this was when the deletion of all the photos of the day took place. Bummer again. We took a bus back to the train station and went back to Florence. We had another awesome delicious cheap dinner. Oh to be back in Italy, where the food is delicious and cheap, sigh. In fact the only remaining picture I have from that day is from the restaurant. We snapped a picture of the place quickly. It was basically empty, plus it was pretty much right across from our hotel.
Overall Siena was really nice, if only it hadn't rained.
