They came, they saw, and then they couldn't leave

Two weeks ago my parents arrived in Pisa and I met them there on Friday.  Pisa's somewhat of a one-trick pony.  Absolutely everything worth seeing is in a small field in a corner of town, and the rest seems to be hotels and restaurants to hold the tourists who come to visit that field.  The city's entire economy relies on some anonymous architect's inadequacy at his job.  Pisa is four degrees of tilt away from obscurity.

We saw the cemetery there and the church and the baptistry, and that's all very nice, and finally we got around to climbing Pisa's Big Mistake.  Now, I hadn't thought about this, but as you climb the tower, you feel bizarre shifts in gravity as you walk the spiraling perimeter of the architecture.  It's really cool and just a little disorienting to feel yourself leaning to one side and slowly, slowly back toward the other as you make the way around.  Someone ought to see what happens when you send a Slinky down the stairs.

We made it to the top of the tower- even my father, after a glorious effort that deserves its own monument- and took in the view.  That night I slept in an air mattress on the floor, and the next day we were off to Lucca.

Lucca is a small, medieval town not far from Pisa.  The famous walls of the city are completely intact, and to enter you need to cross through some tunnels through the border.  We visited a major church, a noble's garden, and climbed to the top of a tower with trees on its top.

That night, in Pisa, we managed to find the one restaurant where all the actual Pisans go to eat, and had what was probably my best meal of the semester.  I should mention that as of this weekend today, I have spent five weekends in a row away, eating wonderfully (Spain / Milan / Pisa / Florence / Cinque Terre).

The next day, Sunday, we took the train back to Bologna, where my parents stayed in a hotel more or less in my neighborhood.  I showed them around some museums and key sites on Monday, and Tuesday they went to Ravenna (they skipped Classe).  Wednesday they left for Florence, and I met them there on Friday.

On Friday we went to Palazzo Pitti, an enormous palace that once housed the Medici family.  It's full of wonderful art, and had a wonderful attached sprawling garden.

The next day we visited the Uffizi Gallery, the major art gallery in Florence, which houses major works of art such as Botticelli's Birth of Venus and masterpieces by all four Ninja Turtles.  As with the Palazzo Pitti, I don't have pictures to show you, and despite how much time we spent there I can't really say much more than "there was a lot of art and it was cool."  The sheer size of the Uffizi was somewhat of an issue, as by the end of the visit I had become so accustomed to astonishing artwork being on every wall that I had stopped paying attention to the individual pieces.

That afternoon (I think, but my chronology isn't quite making sense to me in my head) we went to the Galleria dell'Accademia, where Michelangelo's David is (and not much else of interest, honestly.)  Again, "there was art and it was cool, no photos."  You'll have to trust me on this stuff.

We also stopped by the archeological museum of Florence.  The museum was a bit weird in that there was almost absolutely nothing in the first few rooms, and I was ready to leave, but we kept going and eventually found that everything good was stored in back.  They had mummies!

On Sunday my mom and I took a bus tour to the Chianti region to visit a vineyard for a wine tasting.  The place was very nice, and the guide, who had a surprisingly French accent, showed us all the barrels, and then we all sat down for wine with the usual light fare (bruschetta, bread and oil, prosciutto).  I still don't see what's so great about wine.  The one I liked the most was the cheapest.

Afterword we were taken to the small town of Greve, where we missed the festival of hometown legend Giovanni "why on Earth would anyone want a bridge to Staten Island?" di Verrazzano by one day.

I shot off back to the BO that night, and the next day my parents flew home to-

Oh dear.

My parents had planned to fly from Florence to Rome, and then back home, but the first flight was canceled so they went by train and missed the second flight.  The travel situation wasn't clear at that point thanks to old Eyjafjallajokull, whose name means "fire that halts the skies" in the Black Speech of Mordor.  My grandparents made some calls and found them some relatives in Rome to stay with, and I understand that they had time to see the Pope in the Vatican and have dinner with a relative of Sciortino's before they finally escaped on Friday from what was clearly three days of terrible discomfort.

I'll update soon about this weekend's trip to Cinque Terre.  It was amazing, and on Friday I finished my Unibo class, so I'm done waking up early until summer!