Back in Florence for dinner at one of the most famous restaurants in Italy, Enoteca Pinchiorri. It's one of only five Italian restaurants with three Michelin stars, and also one of the few in the world with a woman chef. For those of you familiar with the quirks of Michelin's rating system, you will understand that the three stars doesn't really mean it has the best food, but rather that it best conforms to Michelin's three star standards. Luxurious surroundings and an enormous staff are absolutely essential to a high rating, but the real key is to have a French connection. In this case, the chef is French, and the food is a sort of French-Italian hybrid. So no doubt there are many more authentic Italian restaurants, but if you just want a wow experience rather than an authentic one, this is your place. The restaurant occupies a sixteenth century palace, but we were lucky enough to sit outside in a charming courtyard. Service was amazingly attentive, although a large portion were Japanese since Japanese tourists seem to make up a large part of the clientele. The wine cellar is supposedly the biggest in the world, and stocking mostly French wines, another prerequisite for a three star rating. We had a ten course tasting menu, which is what we normally do at the global restaurant superstars, and it was outstanding I think. I say I think because we opted for the matching wine, where they serve the perfect accompanying wine with each course. Again this is quite standard for these sorts of restaurants, and usually a great opportunity to sample some unusual wines by the glass. This restaurant is unusual, however, in that there are unlimited refills of each wine. When you start with ten courses and ten matching wines, and combine with extremely attentive staff who top up your glass as soon as you put it down, you've got the makings of a huge hangover the next morning. So we plowed through course after course of interesting food, (including three desserts!) and got very, very drunk. Then we made a terrible mistake. Italy was still using the horrible lira at that time, and the exchange rate was some ridiculous number like 1,380 to 1 dollar. So after drinking dozens of glasses of wine, I attempted to try to figure out what tax and service were included, then give a twenty percent tip to the base amount, while working with a bill in the seven figures. So, as I learned to my horror the next morning, all my expert calculations resulted in leaving a tip of about 1%.



This tipping fiasco did get me thinking about how ridiculous the whole system is. I know many people think tipping is generally ridiculous, but it's never going to change, I just wish it could be standardised across countries. But my real issue is why restaurants force customers to do all this advanced math at the end of a usually drunken meal. It seems to me you should be allowed to just state the percentage you want to leave, rather than have to do all that advanced math while your head is spinning.

Enoteca Pinchiorri (17-16-19).

The interior is really stunning, a riot of black and white marble striping around a forest of arches. The colourful photo which contrasts with the mostly black and white colour scheme of the rest of the cathedral is a library built by a pope who came from Siena.

Siena's cathedral was built in the 12th century, and was the pride and joy of the city. Until, that is, Florence embarked on its building program and came up with a larger cathedral. This prompted the Sienese into the crazy idea of building the world's largest cathedral, by turning its existing cathedral into just one wing of a new super-cathedral. A set of enormous walls was then built to start Siena's Guiness record book entry, but eventually the plague made it impossible to continue with the oneupmanship. So the cathedral stayed pretty much as it was, with a couple of giant walls sticking out one side. Regardless of the addition, it's considered one of the most beautiful churches in Italy.

The city is almost entirely car-free apart from residents, which is a good thing because the medieval streets are really narrow. We had lunch at an outdoor restaurant in one of these alleys, then we continued our walkabout. We scored a photo jackpot when we got an old lady dressed in black down one of the alleys, a perfect Italian stereotype!

The last couple posts were kind of heavy, so here's some easy viewing for you. The city's a great place to walk around, and really empty of tourists once you leave the center.

Just some panoramic rooftop shots to reacquaint you with the burnt siena colour for those of you who've grown out of crayolas. The strict government that gave the world this colour and enforced the relative peacefulness of Siena had its proudest moment in 1260. Florence had assembled a huge army to conquer Siena, but Siena's badly outnumbered militia completely wiped out the invading army. It's regional dominance lasted for another hundred years, until it lost a third of its citizens from plague, and never recovered. This loss crippled the Council, and brought on the usual civil war to add to the plague deaths. Nonetheless, Siena maintained its independence until 1552, when a combined Spanish and Florentine army starved them into submission.

The Palazzo Pubblico has been the center of Siena's government since the early 1300's and still functions as the city hall. The city's nine leading families governed from here during Siena's golden years, and managed to coexist semi-peacefully for a while. This relative calm allowed it to grow into a full-fledged military and economic rival to Florence. It also accounts for the surprising harmony in the city's architecture, as the Council forbade the families from building heavily fortified palaces with huge towers and enforced height restrictions on buildings. The city also maintained a monopoly on brickmaking, ensuring that all buildings were made of the same uniformly coloured brick. The colour is of course memorialized in Crayola crayon sets as burnt siena.

Unlike Florence, which is stuffed with art museums, Siena's greatest art is actually painted on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico. As a result many of the various chambers and meeting rooms are open to the public, and a visit here is the obvious highlight to any Siena visit.

73. Siena

The next day we took a bus to Siena, about an hour south of Florence and its main rival for dominance in Tuscany. (Actually I'm shocked we took a bus, as I'm really not a bus person, but that's what my journal says, so I'm sticking with it.) Southern Tuscany is much more rural than the North, and quite hilly. It was very foggy as we approached the city, but the fog burned off by mid-morning.







We made a beeline for the Campo, the beautiful piazza at the center of the city. The city straddles three separate hilly ridges, and each ridge is a distinct neighborhood with centuries-old rivalries among them. The three ridges come together physically at the Campo. The neighborly rivalries are also played out here each year, in the famous Palio horse race. The jockeys, dressed in medieval riding gear, push their horses furiously around the sharp corners of the Palio, and typically only a third make it all the way around, the rest collapsing around the sharp corners. The winner is treated like a hero by his neighborhood, while the losers are abused with swears and rotten vegetables for the whole year. Unfortunately, the city has discontinued the other neighborhood rivalry event, the gioca del pugno. In this festival, each neighborhood put up a team of 300 men, and the three teams then met in the Campo and had a huge no holds barred fistfight until only one team was left standing.


Even without horses thundering about the place, the Campo is a very lively town center. It's set up like a giant scallop shell, lined with the palaces of the old families and now housing cafes at ground level. There are nine segments dividing up the shell, each representing one of the families who governed Siena via its Council of Nine. These segments slope gently down and converge on the Palazzo Pubblico, or city hall. We had breakfast at one of the tourist cafes and watched the city waking up. It's a good idea to get here early, as the Campo fills up with tour groups by late morning.

I'm trying to stick to my three posts a day rule, and I like doing only one city per day, so this is a bit of a filler to stretch Pistoia out to three posts. Here are a couple more churches, San Francesco, in a more restrained stripe, and San Giovanni in a psychidelic stripe pattern.



We ended the day with dinner back at the hotel and then met Reza for some drinks.

Pistoia is home to a famous hospital complex, Ospedale del Ceppo, done by the same artists as the orphanage in Florence (the one with the lazy susan for unwanted babies). It's a very elegant space, and along the courtyard is a remarkably well preserved series of frescoes recounting the hospital's good deeds.

It was presumably very busy, because Pistoia has a reputation as a particularly nasty, strife-torn city, which is quite a statement. This may stem from the fact that the city became rich through the manufacture of daggers and swords. Then, as technology improved, they gave the world the pistol, named of course after its hometown.

72. Pistoia

We had some extra time so we stopped off in Pistoia on our train back to Florence. Because it never really flourished, having been annexed to Florence since 1320, it felt properly sized for its current population, and therefore livelier. Its cathedral complex is on a very pretty square, but as you can see from the aerial photo, the cathedral seems to have been squeezed in as an afterthought. The main square looks onto the blank side of the church, while the facade of the church really faces nothing. The baptistry is tucked in a far corner. Adjoining the facade is the palace of Pistoia's dominant family, which is now an interesting Etruscan museum.

Lucca, despite its small size, is a real survivor. It was founded by the Romans, and it's really striking to see it from above. That oval in the centre used to be the amphitheatre where gladiators would duke it out. Any trace of the Roman buildings is long gone, but the town grew around it, so the centre is still dominated by this now non-existent Roman building. You can even see the corridors that the gladiators would use to enter the amphitheatre, which are now arcades built through the houses to allow pedestrians to get to the center. Hard to describe, but it's pretty cool.

Like all the rest of Tuscany, the citizens of Lucca devoted most of their time to civil war. The Guinigi were the dominant family in Lucca, which they demonstrated by building the tallest tower on their fortress palace. The tower was used as a watchtower to spy on the other families, and to shoot at approaching enemies. All the big families had their own towers, albeit shorter, and, unique to Lucca, thought it would be nice to plant trees up there as well. They were wrong.

Despite the incessant warfare, they even had a brief taste of empire in the early 14th century, capturing Pisa and Pistoia, and laying siege to Florence until their ruler died of Malaria. The mini-empire crumbled shortly thereafter, but amazingly, while the rest of the Italian city-states were being gobbled up by the Pope, the French and the Spanish, tiny Lucca, along with Venice, were the only two to retain their independence. Lucca was able to stay a free republic until Napoleon's invasion in the early 1800's, whereupon it was finally annexed to the rest of Italy.

The city has two major churches, the Duomo, which is the cathedral, and San Michele, which everyone mistakes for the cathedral. San Michele is the one that looks very majestic from the front, until you peer around back and see that the facade is a fake, with a much smaller church hiding behind the oversize facade. But it's a very pretty sight in a grand plaza. The actual cathedral is done in a similar style (it's Pisan for those of you who are connoissuers of Tuscan church architecture) dominating its own somewhat dusty square.

71. Lucca

The next day we spent the morning successfully obtaining Somchai's visa, which was a bit anti-climactic. After spending two days trying to get a three day extension, I was expecting lots of ribbons and wax seals to evidence this obviously valuable document. Instead, the policeman asked us for a piece of paper, and he wrote something on it and signed his name to it. And that was it. When we left the country, we handed the scribbled on paper to the immigration officer, who looked at it curiously, then threw it away. So that was a total waste of time and we didn't even get a blog pic out of it.


Afterwards we took the train to Lucca, a small prosperous and not altogether interesting city nearby Florence. It comes highly recommended as a place to escape the tourist hordes and see the real Tuscany, but I think only the first half of that recommendation is true. It's like a mini version of Florence, very pleasant but nothing outstanding, and also not very lively. Like Pisa, it was once much more important and larger than at present, so everything feels a bit underutilised. It's most famous feature is its city walls, which were built around 1500 and completely enclose the city. City walls generally add immeasurably to my enjoyment of a city, but these were a little too pretty. Immaculate from outside the city, from atop the walls they looked too wide and too green, and functioned as the city park and jogging track. They did provide nice views over the city's rooftops as we circled the city.

The Piazza dei Cavalieri is Pisa's main square, and contains these historical buildings. The one with the clock at center, the aptly named Clock Palace, is by far the most interesting, but you'll have to suffer through a bit more history to get the full impact of the story. As mentioned earlier, Genoa and Pisa were bitter rivals for the lucrative sea trade. At the time, the Gherardesca family was dominant, sort of the Pisan Medicis. Again, as in Florence, there was plenty of rivalry among the leading families, and with the powerful Archbishop as well. I'll skip all the rebellions and civil wars, but ultimately Ugolini, the leader of the Gherardesca clan, is appointed to lead a naval expedition against the hated Genoans. Unfortunately, the Pisan fleet got totally destroyed by Genoa, destroying their source of wealth and leaving them vulnerable to takeover. The rival families and the archbishop decided that Ugolini intentionally lost the battle due to some secret pact with the Genoans, which may or may not have been true. Regardless, the archbishop had him arrested, and for punishment, had him, his two sons and two grandsons imprisoned in the Clock Palace. It was then boarded up, and they were left to starve to death. As if this were not grisly enough, Dante popularised this event in his Inferno, by adding the famous line that "In the end, hunger overcame grief". At that point Ugolini, who had been eating his arm, crossed over to cannibalism and ate his descendants to stay alive. Scientists continue to investigate their remains to determine the truth of this part of the story, but the Cannibal Count nickname has stuck.

To wrap up the history, defenseless Pisa was quickly annexed to Florence, and a big statue of Medici planted in the middle of the square. Medici also ripped down the old city hall and built a grand building for a new order of crusading knights, pictured here. The last crusades had ended long ago, but this new order was a chance for Medici to give out lots of titles and prizes to rich families craving the status of being a pretend crusading knight. And with that, Pisa fades into obscurity, and our visit draws to a close.