So we ended up sleeping in until 1000 this morning, guess all the walking tired us out more than we thought. After a quick breakfast at our hotel we decided to go to the Boboli gardens for the day since many of the smaller museums that we had looked at going to are closed on Wednesdays.
Made it to the gardens around noon and spent most of the day wandering around the massive grounds. The garden was the backyard of the Pitti palace, a former home of the powerful Medici family. It’s built into the hillside along the Arno river so there are many different terraced levels with statues and fountains and a nice view of the city across the river.
We decided to break for a late lunch around 1430 and found a little pizzaria nearby where we watched them make the pizzas fresh, from rolling out the dough to putting on the toppings (I had mushrooms, jeremy had proscuitto), to baking them in the wood-fire oven. They were excellent, and a bit messy since I asked them not to slice it (I was too hungry to wait for the cheese to cool so a lot of it kept sliding off the crust), but that’s the fun part right? 😉
We reentered the gardens and took our time wandering around the other two-thirds of the garden, frequently chilling on a bench in the shade (it was probably in the high 80s today, humidity was low but still hot in the sun). There were two full scale reconstructions of Pompeii gardens in two of the side terraces, which were cool to see since I had seen similar locations in real life when I visited there.
We headed back to the hotel to pick up our bags around 1800 and lugged things to the train station about a 25 minute walk away. Now its about 1930 and we’re waiting in the station for our overnight train to Paris that should leave around 2045.
(2030)
We’ve migrated to the station platform now, according to the board our train will be 25 minutes late but it’s cooler out here than in the station so we’re trading seats for cooler temperatures. While in the station an American guy struck up a conversation with us. He is from Fredericksburg (Va) and had just gotten out of the Army and was on a month backpacking tour of Europe before applying to PhD programs in political science for next semester. Was interesting hearing how excited he was about politics and everything going on in the world. He wants to teach at a small liberal arts college when he’s finished with his degree, I wish him the best if luck.
And the train waiting continues…