Training - almost!

We started the morning with a jog up the Duomo – all 463 steps of it. To be totally honest, we didn’t really jog it – largely due to the American lady with a large posterior ahead of us blocking the way, and there was a stop half way up for a breather and to admire the extraordinary ceiling painting inside the dome – really rather gruesome, depicting heaven (not much of it) and hell (all the rest of it). I think, on balance, I’ll try not to bother with hell if that’s what it’s like… The view from the outside of the top of the Duomo (the very, VERY top) was amazing, if a little scary…

Then we thought we’d sort out our travel to Pisa Airport for early Saturday morning. We knew we could go by bus or train, so we headed for the bus and train stations. The tourist info place didn’t give out bus or train times. There was no visible train timetable so you had to queue for half an hour for the information booth, but it couldn’t give bus times. The bus ticket office didn’t sell bus tickets, but pointed us at the bar over the road, which did. So we went to the bar and bought bus tickets… Were we being thick, or was that complicated? Then we decided we wanted to get on a bus to Fiesole – a small town 5k out of Florence which has the best view of Florence. We bought bus tickets not from the bar which sells bus tickets, nor from the bus office which doesn’t, but from a little man sitting on an out of commission bus which does sell tickets. Then we needed to walk across town to the bus stop – oddly nowhere near the bus station. And we’d forgotten our map. We found the bus stop by looking at a map back at the tourist office and trying to remember ‘up this road to the green bit, hang a right and keep going till the bloke on the horse statue’ which seemed to do the trick nicely…

At Fiesole we sat and ate pizza and drank wine, watching the new piazza over the road. Granted, piazzas don’t tend to ‘do’ very much, but last time we were here about 5 years ago there was building going on, so we were intrigued to see what had been built. It’s a piazza. With very nice paving. And some benches. Given the level of activity last time (lots of men, lots of diggers, a couple of cranes, masses of scaffolding, miles of boarding, piles of blocks, mud everywhere) we were expecting at least a multi-storey car park. Or a library. But it’s a very nice piazza… And it was very good for people watching too, our favourite being a small elderly woman with a HUGE backpack who was running downhill to catch a bus… we honestly didn’t think she was going to be able to stop, such was the weight of her backpack. She did, but it was a close thing with a rather large tree…

We walked to the top of Fiesole to see the church, which was shut – but the view was great. I had (very vaguely) harboured the idea of running back from Fiesole but I’m glad I didn’t – the return bus journey proved that whilst the first 2 or 3 km would have been quite fun (downhill and scenic), the last 3 or so would have been through the slightly less salubrious (and flat) bits of outer Florence… and it would have been very unsociable for Guy to go back on the bus on his own, wouldn’t it?

And a note to all of you who think there is too much X Factor in the UK. In Italy they have Extra Factor on EVERY NIGHT for about 2 hours, and the proper X Factor where they actually sing (very badly and they talk ENDLESSLY) goes on for ever - on Tuesday night we tried watching to the end to see if the half silver duo or the bloke singing with a toilet would go out - but we fell asleep. By breakfast it had stopped. So it’s somewhere between 3 and 9 hours then…

And, for the record, it was the bird with frizzy hair murdering Donna Summer’s ‘Hot Stuff’ who went out… Half Silver boys and Toilet Man remain to fight another day…