Siena and San Gimignano

I probably just had myself one of the best weekends I've had in quite some time. It all started on Friday with an organized day trip to Siena. I was skeptical at first because it didn't look that interesting on Wikipedia and what not, but I was definitely wrong. Siena was about a 1.5 hour busride away, but the city was amazing. It is a really old medieval city, with a ton of tiny alleyways and sidestreets, two gigantic cathedrals/churches, one large civic building with a really tall tower, and this huge civic square right in the heart of Siena.

Facade of the Cathedral

The day started with a tour of St. Dominic's Basilica. We couldn't take pictures inside the place, but it was pretty cool. The Basilica was gigantic, and was famous for housing the head and finger of St. Catherine. It was really weird, both face and finger were really deteriorated and shrivled. Anyways, we then went on to tour the Cathedral in Siena, which was possible the most unbelievable building I've ever been in. There was so much detail put into building this thing. Even the floors displayed various scenes in Marble. It was huge, and the amount of art and statues that was in this place was just ridiculous.

Floor of the Cathedral

I got a whole mess of pictures of this place up on facebook too. But it was really cool to get a chance to go into this Cathedral. I still can't get over how old all of these places are, and how they possibly could have been made this beautiful at the time. Next, we had some time on our hands, so we wandered around Siena, bought some vino, and hung out for a good chunk of time in this huge city square. It was more like an octagon, but this place was gigantic, just a big wide open space for people to hang out in. I guess at one point in time they had horse races around the square, not too sure if they still do or not though. That's pretty much how Sienna went.

Shot of Siena

After Siena, we all then went to San Gimignano. The bus ride into this town was really cool because we were driving straight through the Tuscan countryside. Just a whole mess of hills and vineyards, which was a lot more interesting to look at than driving on 94. San Gimignano was probably my favorite part of studying abroad so far. It was just this really old town in wine country that had a ton of really nice shops, restaurants, wine cellars, etc. And the views from it were pretty amazing. Just overlooking all the vineyards and the countryside, it finally kind of made me realize that I was in Italy for good now, and not just like a week long vacation. We didn't really do a whole lot in San Gimignano, but I think just the views and the fact that it was just an authentic, Italian city made it the best stop for me thus far.

One of the views from San Gimignano. Pictures really can't do it justice.

The only thing we really did there other than admire the views and walk around the town was stopping at the "world's best gelato shop." They weren't joking. The line was extremely long and went pretty far out the door, but it was definitely worth the wait. By far the best gelato I've ever had. I'm going to be quite unhappy when I come back home to the states and all we have is shitty eddy's and kemps. This place was amazing, can't even describe it. I had a combo of lemon, wildberries, and some kind of blackberry. When I inevitably win the lottery, I'm definitely going to be importing a disgusting amount of that gelato to wherever it is that I'll be living at. So that was our Friday more or less. Saturday a group of about 8 of us went to the Mediterranean to this town called Viareggio. That was a blast too, but I'll put up a post about that excursion when I get the chance.