After the hundreds of motorcyclists drove north past our hotel revving their engines and producing a surreal atmosphere, we thought that the parade was over. WRONG. They all slowly filtered back either solo or in small groups until the wee hours of the morning. At 1:30, I got up, closed the windows, pulled the metal shades tightly closed and tried to turn on the air conditioner to cool off the room and to lower the humidity. This was all in the dark. This was a mistake because I tipped over Ann’s water glass and drenched her bedside table. It took us a while to clean up the mess. Afterwards, I slept really well because the outside sound was mostly closed off. What was still semi-noisy was drowned out by the hum of the air conditioner.
We got up at 7:00 and went down to the breakfast buffet. Most of our group were still there eating and waiting to go to the train depot. We said our final farewells, loaded our rental car, turned on our GPS and headed out to Florence.
Tom Leever suggested a scenic route to get us to Florence. It went north to Forli and then southwest on ss67 which took us into the hills on twisty, narrow roads through small villages and tree-covered terrain. It was a very scenic route and very worthwhile to take.
We got to Florence and Hotel Silla a little after 1:00 We checked into our room. Then we turned in our rental car on the other side of the Arno. Walking back to our hotel, we stopped for a pizza. Then we strolled through the historic part of the city, over Ponte Vecchio and along “the other side of the river” to the hotel stopping to buy bananas and peanuts.
It’s now 5:00 and we are relaxing in our room. We’ll go out again this evening when the temperature goes down a little. It’s over 90 now.
We had a wonderful dinner at Trattoria 4 Leoni. This is a very popular restaurant so we got there around 7:00 to see if we could get in. We were lucky. There were a couple of tables in the outdoor terrace that were set aside for drop-ins. We shared a table with a young couple from Boston who were on a short tour of Italy to celebrate her new PHD form MIT. We had a great conversation with them throughout our dinner. Our waiter was fun, too. He was young and loved to tease us by correcting our Italian pronunciation. He started us out with a small glass of sparkling wine. We ordered a half-liter of wine and he brought us a huge bottle that was in a basket like the old Chianti bottles. We were on our honor to drink the amount that we ordered. For our meal, I started with asparagus baked with slices of parmesan cheese and wrapped with prosciutto. Mt main course was rici pasta in a sauce with sausage. Ann had a salad with tomatoes and Fiocchetti di pera in salsa di taleggio e asparagi – a ravioli-like pasta stuffed with pears with a sauce of taleggio chese and asparagus.
We walked slowly back to the hotel.
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