Siena & San Gimignano

Went to Siena and San Gimignano yesterday!

6:45 am: ...Do I regret signing up for a trip that leaves at 8? Slightly.

(3 of my roommates decided that they would NOT be joining on the trip, so I trekked to the train station to meet the rest of the group to make our way to Siena and San Gimignano!)

First stop- SIENA! 

Lucky for everyone it is about an hour away, which meant a little bit of a nap on the bus :) We got to Siena and made our way to Piazza del Campo (Il Campo). We learned that there is a horse race there every year that has been going on for about 700 years. The race is three laps around the piazza, and it is not a happy race. 

(It is dangerous and some of the poor horses die, and I hated the sounds of it and would never want to see it.)

The piazza was beautiful, we walked around, went to the fountain and inside some of the shops while we were there. 

Alexi and I at the fountain in the Piazza

From there, we walked to the Duomo which had an interesting story to it! 

BEAUTIFUL

 Siena and Florence often competed to make buildings bigger and better than each other- the original plan was to make it this Duomo HUGE HUGE HUGE, but after the plague in 1348, it never was completed. You can see parts where columns were supposed to be built and where there was supposed to be buildings. 

See, this was supposed not be out in the open, it was supposed to be covered and a part of the church. (huge huge huge)

And you may be thinking, "Brig, why are you putting up a picture of the ground?"

WELL YOU SEE... that was supposed to be a column for the big huge extravagant church that didn't get to be finished.

Even though it was not built up to be a huge extravagent thing, it was absolutely stunning inside!

Panorama!

The Libreria Piccolomini was amazing. I wanted to sit in there all day or lie on the floor and just soak it all up! Sadly this is not socially acceptable anywhere sooooooo I just had to take a lot of pictures instead!

These are old versions of sheet music!

After that we went into the museo and walked up a lot of spiral stairs so we could get the panoramic view of Siena! 

After going to the Baptistry, we got lunch and then it was back to the bus and off to San Gimignano!

San Gimignano was so pretty! It  is very small and medieval looking still! They originally had 75 towers in the village, now they have 14. The town was very small and cute and I was fun to look around and shop around! We were all pretty tired at this point but we only spent about an hour or so there!

At the top of Via San Giovanni is the center of town, formed by two interlocking triangular "piazze"-- Piazza della Cisterna and Piazza del Duomo which are  the city's main church and civic palace.

It was a really great day and I was so happy that I went!