Italy: Florence and Sienna, Wednesday 3/20/24

Day trip to Sienna! We had breakfast at Bianco, a small cafe near the car rental place, Rental Plus, then went to pick up our rental car. Andrew, as usual, had taken on the task of driving us all to Sienna, about an hour away. Sienna has an outdoor market every Wednesday morning, and we were happy to have chosen this day as the day of our visit. We found parking in a garage and navigated our way to the market (with a few wrong turns). It was a huge market--I imagine this is where people who don't have Target do their Target shopping. I got a purse, Lucia and I got some fancy straps to swap out on our new purses, Lucia got some crystals, Mom got a wallet.

Then we had lunch at Bar Il Palio, sitting outside, overlooking the main piazza. It was a lovely setting. We had:

Drinks: glasses of prosecco (me and Mom), beer for Andrew, hot chocolate for Greta, Fanta for Lucia

Me: quattro formaggio pizza

Andrew: Toscana pizza

Lucia: prosciutto and burrata

Greta: pappardelle with wild boar sauce

Mom: focaccio with eggplant and chickpeas

Dad: margarita pizza

Restored, we headed to the Duomo of Sienna. It was spectacular. We walked all around the church then went into the museum, where we saw Ducio's original stained glass rose window and even climbed up a very manageable spiral staircase for a view over Sienna. Andrew, Lucia, and Greta climbed an additional spiral staircase for a higher vantage point. 

We took a rest at another cafe on the main piazza, and it was here that we discovered the turn of bad luck the Fontana del Porcellino brought Mom: her gold cross, which she's worn every day since she was ten, was gone. It had, somewhere, fallen off the chain. We did some quick forensics with our photos and determined that she must have lost it somewhere in or around the Duomo or the museum. We went back, and Andrew and the girls and I searched everywhere in the church and in the area surrounding it. We did not find it. 

Then it was time to drive home and return the rental car, an adventure that involved finding a gas station and then the garage where the car was to be returned, and then a very long walk home. Dinner was leftover food at the apartment--the kids would have mutinied if we'd dragged them back out of the house--and then packing up for the next part of our trip.

A few random notes:

--As usual, the girls are Fanta-ing their way through the trip. 

--Though she loves Starbucks, Lucia has refused to get a cappuccino even once.

--Greta, sitting at little tables with her cornetto and cappuccino, looks like a ghost of her future self. I can see her coming back here.

--Lucia has been in rare, hilarious form this trip, making us all laugh hysterically with her British accent and funny, overexcited fist pumps and leaps. 

--The girls crack themselves up every time we sit down for a meal. Seeing them laugh hysterically together is one of the joys of traveling for me--a direct result of our forcing them to have their phones on airplane mode the entire time. They're forced to interact.

--Greta has been keeping meticulous writeups of each day. For some reason, she shared the long Note with Lucia, and each night I hear them laughing uproariously in their room as Lucia gives a dramatic reading of that day's entry. In every entry, Greta starts off by saying we all got coffee EXCEPT LUCIA (caps are hers).