Siena day one

The view from the end of our bed in the morningGelato any oneThe square in the centre of SienaThe view from the top of the Siena muesumTaking in the vista
That's a long way downSiena CathedralInside the Siena CathedralInside the Siena Cathedral
Inside the Siena CathedralInside the Siena CathedralInside the Siena CathedralSiena libraryThese are no ordinary booksSiena library
The Battistero Siena

Siena day one, a set on Flickr.

7/6/2011

We woke up today to the lovely view from our bedroom window (see pic)

We decided that we would venture out with the car and try and find some parking as close as we could to the walled city of Siena. We had been given some instructions but once you are out there trying to negotiate the traffic it is another story. We found parking that we thought was close but as it turns out Siena is not flat and the walled city is quite high up and so a step and long climb from our car was required.

Siena is different again to the other places with the same skinny streets but this time the shops were larger and more variety.

After wondering around the city for a bit. We could not pass by an incredible Gelato store without trying another of these delicious ice creams (see the pic of the shop window display, and yes that is the real stuff).

We then bought a combined ticket to get us into all the main attractions. ‘The Museum’ has amazing Italian art. ‘The Battistero’ was the meeting point of the greatest renaissance sculptors. ‘The Cathedral’ which is said to have bought tears to a king who visited there in 1880. Check out the photo of Sheree standing by the massive entrance doors to get a sense of the size of this place. ‘The Siena library’ with some of the oldest manuscripts. See the photo with Sheree and the size of the old books. The paintings around the walls in here were incredible. ‘The Panorama’ that gives amazing birds eye views of Siena. ‘The Cripta’ that is dedicated to the first paintings using colour and lastly ‘The Oratorio’ that has some of the most amazing surveys of Sienese pictorial production starting from the 16 century. It took us most of the afternoon to get around all these.

We then headed home and planned were to go for tea while sitting on the deck and enjoying some of the food and wine we had bought. It was late before we headed out to a restaurant on the other side of the walled city. It took a lot longer than we though to get there and there were some really skinny streets. Once we found the restaurant ordering was another treat as this was true Italian and very little English was spoken. After a few pigeon english words and some sign language we had no idea what we had just ordered until it arrived. What a relief when what we received tasted great. After a lovely meal we headed back home but this was a trying time as we kept taking wrong turns in the dark and the GPS was constantly recalculating. Steven was not enjoying this at all. Finally around midnight and feeling very tired we got home and hit the sack.

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