Fiesole

After two days in Venice, the Harlaxton tour took us on by coach to Florence. It was a lovely three-hour ride down through Bologna and into Tuscany. We got in to Florence around 1 pm and had most of the rest of the day to ourselves. Once again, I tagged along with Ian and Michaela who suggested visiting Fiesole, a village up on the northern hills overlooking Florence. It was Ian's 46th birthday and he wanted to return to a restaurant there to celebrate. I naturally agreed and we got on the Number 7 bus in the Piazza San Marco and off we went.

Sadly, on our way to the bus, we passed a group of Harlaxton students...all boys, leaving the train station with bags from McDonalds, heading back to the hotel. That said it all. Here we were, our first day in Florence, and the only thing these kids wanted was to eat a Big Mac in their hotel room. One hopes they will grow up to regret that decision! Sigh.

Amazingly, Fiesole was settled but the Etruscans about 4000 years ago. It was their most important city and there are still walls and two tombs there. The Romans also settled the area and built villas, an ampitheatre, and a massive bath house up on the hill side which we spent our time wandering through as the sun slowly set in the west.

While I have seen the ruins of Roman roads in Provence and plenty of Roman antiquities in museums, this was my first encounter with seeing the remains of ampitheatres and villas in situ. We could wander around the old pools, the cauldarium (the hot baths), the tepidarium (the lukewarm rooms), and the frigidarium (the cold rooms. We stood on the stage of the ampitheatre and tried our best to recite bits of Marc Antony's "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech.

Over near the villa, there were two old altars. Ian was under the misapprehension that the Romans sacrificed humans so he decided to offer himself on the altar. Michaela and I just shook our heads.

After the ruins, we wandered back to the town square and followed the signs up a steep hill to the Convento di San Francesco, an old convent with a spectacular view down into Florence. Interestingly, the convent was built on an old acropolis, the foundations of which you can see if you visit the convents museum. The museum was quite a surprise. It contained a huge collection of Japanese porcelain from the days one of the Franciscan friars was a missionary. There was a pair of plates with exquisite winter scenes on them that I would have grabbed in a heartbeat! I was beginning to sense how important it was to go off the beaten path and find these kinds of surprises.

By the time we got back to the Piazza, the sun had set and the local ambulance service was having a Christmas fund raiser...roasting chestnuts and selling Christmas breads and cakes. The whole village seemed to have turned out just to spend time chatting over some mulled wine. I am guessing we were the only non-residents in the bunch. When they turned on the Christmas tree and the children all gathered to sing Christmas carols you felt you were in a movie...an Italian one of course.

Dinner at Pegusus was everything Ian promised. We had beautiful antipasti...a pate spread on crusty bread, a pasta course of delicious seafood, and then the main event. Ian wanted bistecca , a thick porterhouse style steak for which this restaurant has a reputation. What came out was a steak that had to be close to 3 pounds. They put it down on a cutting board and artfully carve all the meat off the bones before presenting us with all of it. The steak was rare...they only just show it to the flames according to Ian and there was probably enought meat for 4 or 5 people realistically. I ate as much as I could but there was still at least a 6-8 oz portion left. I could manage it. I knawed one of the bones but that was it. I accepted an expresso but feared having one more bite of food...yes, think Mr. Creosote from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. We rolled out of the restaurant...more than sated and waited in the now cold wind for a bus that we thought would never come. We headed back down the hill into Florence content that we had really found the locals and enjoyed a village's pre-Christmas celebrations up in the Tuscan hills! No McDonalds for us!