Florence

The flight we had back from San Sebastián landed in Pisa, where we spent part of a day first walking around before taking a short train ride to Florence. Nothing stood out too much about Pisa, besides the swarm of tourists around the leaning tower. Matt expressed the desire to go up to one of the people doing the pose for a picture pretending to hold up the tower, and high five their extended hand. Fortunately we witnessed another guy do that.

We stayed in Florence for something like 9 days. Time went towards finding decent Tuscan restaurants (almost all catered to and were full of tourists), and some time was also eaten up recovering from a bad cold, on my part. But around the city, we walked around a lot, went in the duomo and up the attached tower, to a Leonardo da Vinci museum (re-creations of his machines), to the city food market, and around the leather market. One of our first days was on a pre-booked day tour, which took us on a bus to Siena, montecino, montepulciano, piensa, and the val d'orcia. Brown empty fields weren't quite what I expected when I earlier saw photos of the lush green valley online, but I guess we went at the wrong time of year. The tour also stopped at a winery specializing in brunello. Matt didn't get the full experience, being on antibiotics and unable to have any samples, but he did get a kick out of the 80 year old Italian owner who kissed and pinched cheeks of the women on the tour. Another day, we navigated confusing bus routes and took a trip to San Gimignano, the medieval New York City with several towers in its centre. Overall the sites in Tuscany were very picturesque but completely overrun by tourists. In fact we found the scenery of Molise around Giovanni's farm to be more stunning. We had some good Tuscan food though. (Bistecca alla fiorentina, ribollita, trippa alla fiorentina, polpette, etc)

Venice

After Florence we stayed in Venice for 3 days with an airbnb host who was a poet/author, who met up with us on our way in to help navigate down the narrow maze-like streets to his apartment (which smelled of fish, but was right on a canal). The highlight of our visit was Burano, a smaller (quieter) town accessible by water bus that was full of very pretty, brightly painted houses of all different colours. It's known for its lacemaking, and besides a picnic we spent most of our time looking through shops. While in Venice, Matt made a point of trying cicchetti, but our favourite culinary activity was to take bread, cheese and fruit, and eat them on an empty dock on the grand canal at sunset. Besides a fishing boat coming into dock (slamming into it) then leaving, it was very peaceful. We also made it into several Asian tourists' photos, who thought us picturesque as they were driven past on gondolas.

Bologna

 8 days back in bologna provided us with a bit of a reprieve from the packing-unpacking-packing routine we had been enduring every 3 days or so. Even though we had ended up in Bologna unexpectedly previously, we were overjoyed to return to our favourite Italian city and it's dense population of doxies and delicious eateries. While we were there Matt's parents visited and time was spent going to a greatest hits of restaurants we had previously discovered. So basically the week was just lots of delicious food. It was also a nice break, since our airbnb lodgings was an entire apartment to ourselves.

Bergamo

Our final visit before we started up on farms again was Bergamo, home of the pastas scarpinocc and casonsei. Being a city in the north of Italy, polenta was also in plentiful supply. We arrived on time, but were greeted by our airbnb host late and with the news of our accommodations not actually being where they were stated on the website. After a 15 minute journey even further away from the city we arrived at our palace and immediately decided to find some dinner. After much searching we settled on a cafe