Last Friday, we had our final group tour for our lectures and tours class--a day trip to Siena. I must say I had mixed feelings about the whole thing, because while tours with our professors (who are great btw!) seem to drag on a little longer than we'd all like, it was weird and kinda sad knowing that I won't have any more of them.
Siena was a beautiful Italian town, and I'm glad I got to visit and learn about it in the process. We saw the Duomo which was almost identical to Orvieto's Duomo which I saw last semeser--the inside is much more ornate in Siena, however with its black and white stripes and its frescoed Biblioteca Piccolomini. We also visited the main piazza in Siena, Piazza del Campo, which is the site of the famous Palio horse races that take place in July and August.
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| Siena Duomo |
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| Inside the Duomo |
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| Biblioteca Piccolomini in the Duomo |
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| Piazza del Campo |
A highlight of Siena was the Basilica di San Domenico where Saint Catherine of Siena's incorruptible head and thumb are housed! A little creepy, but a cool story behind it: when St. Catherine died in Rome, her body was buried in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (a church right down the street from our classroom building), but the people of Siena wanted her back, so they smuggled her head back to Siena in a bag. When stopped by the Roman guards, they prayed to St. Catherine to help them. Upon inspection of the bag, it appeared to no longer contain her head, but rose petals instead. Once they got back to Siena, her head was visible once more. How crazy is that?!
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| View of San Domenico in the distance |
After a delicious meal with Ana, she and the rest of the group boarded the bus back to Rome, while my friend Karla and I stayed in Siena for the evening. We were planning on doing some further shopping and sightseeing in the little town, but as soon as we checked into our B&B and laid down on our memory foam mattresses, we were completely out until 9:30 pm!! Oh well--at least we finally caught up on some sleep!!
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| The perfect Italian meal <3 |
The next morning, Karla and I took the train to Pisa, where we did a short stopover just to see the Leaning Tower and take our obligatory pictures. The tower is pretty cool, but it is pretty much the only thing to see in Pisa and is naturally very touristy. We took our goofy pictures holding up and hugging the tower and laughed at other people doing the same.
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| #tourist |
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This guy was literally doing every pose humanly possible with the tower...quite the entertainment!
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However, due to a slightly longer than expected bus ride from the Duomo/Tower back to the train station, we missed our next train to Cinque Terre by literally 2 minutes! So we ended up waiting in Pisa for another hour before (illegally) getting on the next train with our tickets from our missed train. When the conductor came around to check tickets, we acted stupid and confused about the times, and hey, it worked! But instead of our original direct train to Monterosso (the northern-most town where we were staying in Cinque Terre), the train we got on had a stopover in La Spezia, so we had to repeat the playing stupid game again! Karla described all the in-between random happenings very well in her Facebook status update that day:
"While en route to The Cinque Terre with Mackenzie Woods...Due to stupid pictures in Pisa, our one-hour direct train to Monterosso became a 3+hour fiasco with transfers. Of course, all began to literally go downhill when I tumbled down a fleet of stairs, only to be stopped by the kind janitor who was mopping said staircase. Upon finding a seat (after having jumped moving tracks) we witnessed the potential theft of a child via a dog carrier by an elderly Asian woman who insisted it was a dog. The epic did not end there, as we proceeded to be harassed by preteen Italian boys putting lizards in our path.....I'm not on drugs; I'm on trenitalia, and I need a drink."
By the time we finally made it to Cinque Terre where our friend Erin and her sister Meg were waiting to meet us, we were laughing out of delirium at the ridiculousness of our day plus the fact that just as we arrived in this beautiful outdoorsy coastal town, it started to rain (and continued to do so for the rest of the weekend). We made the best of it though, exchanging travel stories with Erin and Meg over a drink at a cute bar overlooking the water in Monterosso. We then made our way to our B&B by hiking through the hills--literally--since the main road between the new town of Monterosso (where the train station is located) and the old town is under construction. So what should have taken only a minute by car took us 30 minutes hiking! We were relieved when we finally made it to our adorable B&B and were greeted by the owners, Gian Luigi and Cherry! We rounded out the evening by walking around the little town in the rain and eating homemade pesto pasta and drinking vino in a cute restaurant on the shoreline.
Sunday morning we went to Palm Sunday mass at the little Catholic Church in Monterosso and it was just the cutest thing EVER! The procession started outside with lots of little children and their grandparents who were giving them handmade ornately decorated palm branches, each tied with a donut-like pastry on it. Even the little altar boys were eating the donuts off their palm branches during mass! It was quite different to experience mass in this tiny town--especially compared to the size and grandeur of masses I've been attending at the Vatican--but I really liked the personal, close-knit community aspect in Monterosso. It just felt so authentically Italian.
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| Palm Sunday procession |
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| Italian children playing with their palms |
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| Doesn't get much more Italian than this... |
Because of mudslides over the past few months and rainy weather, the main coastal trails in Cinque Terre were closed, so Karla and I hiked inland and still got some fabulous views. We did the majority of our hiking within Monterosso and then took a train through the other towns, stopping off in the southernmost one, Riomaggiore. By the time we got there, though, it was pouring rain and we didn't have much time until we had to get back to catch our train. We didn't escape train delays and issues on the way back, which made for a very long (and motion-sick on my part) trip back to Rome. Needless to say, we were exhausted and looking forward to being off of buses and trains for awhile.
Cinque Terre was beautiful, even in the rain, so I can only imagine those 5 coastal towns in the summertime---next family vacation, mom and dad??!
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