Now That's What I'm Talkin' About

For whatever reason, Ronnie and I have been quoting movies a lot the last couple of days. That line is from State And Main, a David Mamet movie about a bunch of Hollywood types shooting a movie in a very small New England town. It's got a great cast (William H. Macy, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Sara Jessica Parker, Julia Stiles and more) and like most Mamet things, very funny with lots of quotable lines.

We left the part of Tuscany that people think of as being real Tuscany today. We spent most of the day in Siena, where I confessed to Ronnie that it just wasn't grabbing me. I could appreciate the beauty of it all, but it wasn't really doing anything for me. She said, quite cleverly (I'll explain later), that it was because nothing fun had happened in any of those places and that you only really feel connected if you're having fun. As I pondered this, we stopped for lunch at the big Piazza in Siena, San Marco or San someone else or whatever it's called (see, this is what I mean) and I sat facing this HUGE public space, with absolutely no level ground in the entire 42 hectares of it (I remain convinced that hectares is a fictitious unit of measurement and so when people in Europe want to say something is big they just choose some ridiculously large number of hectares and when they get asked how amy acres that is they just make that up too). and I really liked the way it looked. It's dominated by a huge and completely ridiculous-looking building, mostly brick with a huge marble arched entryway that looks like it was added on several centuries after the original building was finished. It has 10 symmetrically placed turrets on one side and a very tall tower on the other side. There are 3 crests in the middle of the building that have crowns suspended over them. The architect was clearly insane. And I loved it. I really thought it was cool and I even took pictures of it. So I felt better after that. Siena is a really nice place. Not too big, not too small, very pretty.

So as an aside to explain another aside, I'm reading Pride and Prejudice at the moment, and I'm beginning to talk and think like a 19th century British woman. One of the things I keep thinking is, "How fine to have a clever wife!"

After leaving Siena, we tried to visit Volterra, but were thwarted by our choice of two seemingly infinite sets of steps walking up to the town. Siena had a good 500 foot vertical drop to get to the parking lot, but they have escalators. You'll see a picture of one set of stairs below. So we looked at the Etruscan walls and the Roman theater that I guess the Romans built to entertain the Etruscans after they conquered them or maybe just to entertain themselves. So we left for the beach, passing Pisa on the way (saw the tower from the road, it's definitely leaning).

Viareggio is actually in Tuscany, but it's on the Ligurnian Sea, or something like that, whatever's between Northern Italy and France and Monaco. Everyone we've mentioned this to as a destination looks puzzled and has either never heard of it or doesn't understand why we'd want to go there. All I can say to these people is HA! Viareggio is great. It's a beach town in the classic sense. Our hotel is across the street from the beach, and we have a terrace from which we can see the entire sweep of the beach, which is mostly covered by beach chairs in neat rows, alternating colors among the beach clubs. There's a long promenade by the beach, lined with shops and restaurants, and between the street and the promenade is a bike path.

We were lucky enough to get upgraded to a suite at the hotel where we have a terrace that must be 12 hectares. That's about 500 square feet. Really. I could just stay on the terrace the entire time. But then we got hungry.

None of the guidebooks recommend restaurants here. They just say go somewhere and order fish. So we did. We sat at an outdoor table and I had mixed grilled fish. I'm not positive about everything, but there was swordfish, langoustine, calamari, some other small fish, and by far the best shrimp I have ever had in my life- sweet and moist and perfectly cooked. None of that dry shrimp cocktail kind of stuff. This was melt-in-your-mouth good. And it was accompanied by the largest beer I've ever had- a 1 liter mug. I didn't mean to get that, but I've ordered worse things by accident. While we ate we watched lots and lots of people walk by. It was probably 10:30 when we finished dinner and the stores were still open and and it was very pleasantly busy. Not sure if there are any other Americans here. It's very pan-European though. It was still very active at 11:15 when we got back to our hotel.

Siena