I’m a little behind on the posts here, so I am going to clump a couple different trips into one post and tell more details about the story when I get home in less than three short weeks.
A couple weekends ago my friends and I were lucky enough to travel to Milano, the city of high fashion. A dear friend of ours, Patricia (who lived with us here in Siena for a couple weeks at the beginning of our stay), lives in Milano now and so we had a free (and great!) place to stay. I took this trip with three of my dearest friends here and was relieved to have a small, familiar group.
Being silly in Milan
So, we mostly shopped around (I bought two pairs of shoes…pretty much my only purchases in Italy so far) and looked at beautiful things. The duomo in Milan was absolutely beautiful, but because it was covered in pigeons, it was a little hard to enjoy.
Steph, the Duomo and I
The weekend after we went to Milan, we were lucky enough to take another amazing trip…this one organized completely by our program here. When we get these trips it is such a treat because we don’t have to worry about anything: we are fed, entertained, transported…we just have fun.
This particular weekend, we got to go see a very famous opera called Manon Lescaut. Mind you, it wasn’t my first choice of a Puccini opera to see but beggars can’t be choosers. So, we went to Lucca and saw a famous Puccini opera in a charming little opera house with a beautiful chandelier and red velvet seats.
Notice the lovely background
It was really fun getting dressed up and going out since so often here we are focused on going to and from class…in the cold. It isn’t always very pretty or exciting. So, this was a nice change.
Katie and I inside
We felt very fortunate to have done such a monumental thing…and opera! In Italy! Lucky us!
For this Thanksgiving weekend Billie hopped the pond to come visit me. What a lucky girl I am. We took a very lovely trip to Torino (a town in the north of Italy at the base of the Italian alps). The winter olympics were in Torino a couple years ago so they are quite adept at dealing with tourists, but there were hardly any tourists around. A great mix, if you ask me. It snowed the second day we were there, which was a nice treat.
Snow on Thanksgiving!
This is the view from our hotel room on Thanksgiving. We were right next to the River Dora and there were a couple different walking bridges across the (disgustingly murky) water. However, when it’s covered in snow…the water doesn’t seem so bad. (-:
We also found an amazing restaurant just across this bridge and ate there two nights in a row. I exercised my Italian skills and asked our cab driver for a recommendation and he sent us here for a “traditional Piemontese meal…” how could we not go? It was a little family run place where the menu changed every night and was written on a plain little notebook. Through the kitchen door we could see the old Italian grandmother in the back tending to every dish.
The blurry menu
The architecture in Torino was something amazing. Every building in the downtown area was beautiful. We walked around the city a lot and while we saw the famous Egyptian Museum (amazing!), we mostly just explored the city.
Royal Palace
This was an old Royal Palace that over-looked a beautiful piazza with lots of kids, dogs and water fountains. Torino was a beautiful city a little off the beaten track and I’m glad I got to see it. In the end, we headed back to Florence and Billie left on a plane headed for California (well, technically headed to Frankfurt, then London, then California) and I headed back to Siena.
When I got back to Siena I was happy to see that the streets were lined with Christmas lights and the whole city was glowing with holiday cheer. Seeing Billie, walking in the snow and seeing the streets of Siena lit up so completely had made me miss home more than ever. I have two weeks of instruction here, including finals, and I will be very ready to come home.
I know I will miss this beautiful place but I am also looking forward to returning to everything I know and love so dearly.
Signing off from Siena…
Hmmm, I would appreciate it if you used my formal name in any reference to me, that would be greeaatt….
Great trip, story, and especially photos! Thanks for taking the time to share.