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“The Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!” -Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad”* In lieu of a “Welcome” sign, your arrival in Florence is marked by an increase in the amount of graffiti on walls running alongside the train tracks. At home in Los Angeles, dedicated crews remove such tagging in a perpetual game of Whack-a-Mole. Here, though, no one seems to mind, and you have to wonder if the oldest layers of paint date b

We start the day in Siena with a continental breakfast – the standard, uninspired fare of hardboiled eggs, cold cuts, cheese, bread. Evermore important, though, we get the party started by pounding some machine-made espresso, then we head outside. The van pulls up right on schedule, and we are the second couple in. We stop at two more hotels up the road, then begin the 45 minute trek along winding roads of Tuscany. Eventually, the medieval towers of San Gimignano start to pee

“Tuscany looks like what all of Italy should look like.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (attributed) We stare out the train window as the green, rolling hills glide by, somewhere between Rome and our next destination north, the Tuscan city of Siena. Along the way, we occasionally spot old, crumbling castles perched atop hills in the distance, slowly being claimed by nature. Small villages hug mountain ridges, leaving me to wonder how they en

Siena is such a confusing place, initially, when arriving by rail. You walk out the front door of the train station, and all you see in the vicinity is a mall, straight ahead. The mall, in this case, is key in getting you where you need to go, as it contains a system of ten – yes, ten – escalators that eventually hoist you to the top of a mountain. Had I done my homework beforehand, or happened to carry a topographical map, I would have known that Siena is one of those mounta