October 9, 2025–Florence, Italy

Tonight we are in Florence, where will stay until we fly out on Monday morning.  We spent the last three nights in Siena in a hotel at the heart of the Siena City Center, or Piazza del Campo.  

The Grand Hotel Continental in Siena where we stayed was constructed in the 17th-century and originally built as a wedding present from Pope Alexander VII to his niece, Olimpia, and her husband Giulio de’ Gori. It has been a hotel since 2002, and maintains its original Renaissance architecture with frescoes, antiques, and terracotta floors.  It is an absolutely gorgeous hotel.  The first picture is of our room; the second picture is a sitting room which was probably once a ballroom; the third picture is of the street beneath our room.

Siena is a walled town and the center is fortified  by ancient brick walls, bastions, and towers built between the 14th and 16th centuries.  The first thing you notice when you walk into the Piazza del Campo is the tower of Torria del Mangia.  The tower was built in 1338–1348, and is located next to the Palazzo Pubblico (Town Hall).  The tower was built to be exactly the same height as Siena Cathedral as a sign that the church and the state had equal power.  The clock on the lower part of the shaft was added in 1360, and it chimes like clockwork, as they say.  It’s amazing to think that for hundreds of years, people have been sitting in that square, hearing that clock chime.  All of the awnings in the last picture are sidewalk restaurants.

The other famous building in Siena is the Siena Cathedral, which was designed and completed between 1215 and 1263.  It has the form of a Latin cross with two transepts (left and right), a dome and a bell tower.  In case you are wondering what a transept is, it is a part of a cruciform (cross-shaped) building that projects at an angle from the main body and forms the arms of the cross.  

I have had to look up many Italian words lately since my grasp of the language is limited.  Italian has many similarities to Spanish if you studied that in high school or college.  Inexplicably, I took German (I won’t go as far as to say that I studied German).  In restaurants the menus aren’t that difficult to figure out because a lot of the words are the same: pizza, pasta, ragu, lasagna, pomodoro, etc.  But sometimes you just have to guess at things.  Like today when I wanted to buy some sparkling water, my choices were acqua naturale or acqua gassata.  I chose gassata because CO2 gas is used to carbonate water and gassata sounded closer.  It’s not always so easy, though.  Road signs are super confusing.  

Below is the picture of the newsstand we had to drive by to get to our hotel. No, it does not look like you should be driving a car through there.

 

We returned our car today (thank goodness) and will either walk or take taxis in Florence.  We will miss our long suffering GPS, a nice British gentleman we called Alfred.  There are many toll roads here, and Alfred freaked out every time we approached a toll booth.  He kept saying,  “Warning.  Approaching toll booth,” over and over in his uber polite, yet hoity-toity manner.  The toll booths were all automated and confusing, so Alfred had reason to be concerned.  We would sit there forever trying to figure out the directions, all of which were stated by an automated voice in super fast Italian.  The credit card readers worked only occasionally, so we had to dig out Euros most of the time.  Once we succeeded the voice would say quite cheerfully, “arrivederci.”  Yeah, whatever.  Back at you.