Day 4: Rome and Florence (6/1/18)

This morning began with another delicious breakfast at our B&B. Instead of the thumbprint pizzas we appeared to have full sized pizza slices. We called them pizzas but they were really just this crusts with tomato sauce on them. No other toppings.

After breakfast we toured ancient Rome. We began at the Colosseum, where animals fight animals, people fought animals, people fought people and criminals were sometimes put to death for sport. We worked our way through the Roman forum, the city center of ancient Rome, and Capitoline Hill. The hill is one of the seven hills of ancient Rome, and it now houses a museum with more statues than you can imagine.


Inside the Colosseum


Inside the Forum


View of the Forum from Capitoline Hill.

In the evening we caught our train to arrive in Florence. The train went up to a maximum sustained speed of 260 km/h! We were flying! We made it to Florence in an hour and a half when my GPS said it would take four by car!

Our new home base is on the bank of the Arno River. We had a strange meal on the other side of the Arno in the Oltrano district. We thought we had ordered an appetizer, first course, and second course, but we were given two first courses. We still can't figure out how it happened. We had been talking about the eggplant parmesan before our waiter came, but neither of us can remember mentioning it while he was at the table. It was kind of like when Google starts showing you ads for those shoes you looked at last week online. In any case, the meal was fine. Not our favorite, but still better than the Italian restaurant in Harrisonburg. 


View from our room


The Arno on the way to dinner

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