Arezzo!

Heard of it? I’m guessing many haven’t. Or maybe it’s just me … I sure hadn’t heard of it before.

Dan and I had talked about visiting some smaller towns — ones that weren’t so tourist-filled. I looked at our itinerary and chose this place because it was between Florence and our next destination. (But yes, I promise I did read about it and thought it was an interesting sounding spot.)

So this morning we ate a bit earlier and ended up in a taxi a bit earlier than we expected, but since I get nervous about missing trains and planes I was okay with that. The taxi driver took a route that landed us behind a (small) trash collecting vehicle, and our fee was getting higher as we sat there, but what can we do? He did get us to the train station, and when Dan went to pay he said he didn’t accept cards. Heh. Right. Dan questioned that and then the driver lowered the price. Well whatever, we had the cash, and we saved a tiny bit of money.

We were (surprise, surprise) too early. Okay … no surprise at all. This is what an early bird looks like:

And here is what that early bird looks like when he gets on the train:

When we got on the train we learned that our seats were back-to-back rather than facing each other. This was the second time this happened, and I’m realizing I was reading the seating chart incorrectly. What a goof I can be! We have at least one more train where I very likely did the same thing. I’m hoping it’s just one more, but I don’t think I want to check the tickets at the moment — I hate to find out I’m wrong and there are more. I can’t find a place to see if we can change seats, so it’ll be what it’ll be. This time it was no issue, as the train was close to empty anyway. Maybe it’ll be that way on the rest of the trips. I can hope.

We arrived in a very hot Arezzo. I guess I should have researched temperatures as well! At first glance it seemed like a ho-hum place. We even agreed we’d just relax and hang out and make it an easy and lazy day tomorrow. We found our little B&B (which doesn’t come with the second B right at the location, but we have to walk to “Coffee O’Clock” for that. Not a big deal, but when I reserved the place the breakfast looked so yummy at the B&B. It’s a small place, and the elevator is a funny little thing (The two of us can’t fit into it with our backpacks and all!) The stairs are, as is frequently the case, spiral things. I believe there might only be four rooms here, and I’m not sure anyone else is even staying here at the moment. Our room is very simple, but pretty large, and it will do fine for the brief time we are here (two nights).

While in our room I realized our next train was scheduled several hours after we have to check out here, so I quickly went online and managed to change those tickets to an earlier time. Right after I looked more carefully at our tickets: it’s just a regional train (no specific seats) and there is a four hour allowance to go on a different train. Oops! Lesson learned on that one. After some time (since we weren’t wowed by the city we were moving slowly) we went out to see what we could find for lunch. Wellll … we went up the street a bit and suddenly we were in an old part of the town and it was so nice, and full of surprises!

But first lunch: we ordered and it’s about half the price as it was in Florence. Same with our lodging. It’ll be nice to pay a bit less for a while. Both Barcelona and Florence were more costly. I was starting to get a bit worried about how much we’d spend. (Truth be told, we could do the “order and then stand up to eat your lunch” kind of place and save money. But we kind of like to sit down when we’re eating.)

Back to the cool city info: there’s the old wall (this was an Etruscan town), the cathedral was really nice, the main piazza is very cool, and there is just a lot to see. I’m sure we won’t get to it all, but we’ll do what we can fit in our one full day here!

Some trivia: Guido Monaco (Guido d’Arezzo) taught music here, and he’s the one credited with making “the modern musical note system with the invention of the tetra-gram” (reading from the info on a map we were given). And you all probably knew that already, but I only learned about that when I was looking at Arezzo for this trip. Some of “Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni) was filmed here. They have a horse riding joust every year (we won’t be here then). Finally Petrarch (really Francesco Petrarca) was born here.

As always we took a bit of a siesta in the late afternoon. (Well, Dan took a siesta and I took a shower, if I’m going to be honest here. You’d thank me for taking that shower if you were here with us.)

Dinner was a nice little place right around the corner, eating outside in a wonderful temperature at that point. We aren’t sure what tomorrow will bring: they say it might rain here. That would be a first on this trip.

Ciao for now!