Lofty Volterran Adventures. . .

Arrival in Volterra was early and painless. The view of the tuscan hillside was also spectacular, though the bus ride a bit stomach churning. Volterra was much higher and more secluded than the other hill towns we'd seen so far, and the seminary we stayed at had a great view from the window of the entire countryside. As with San Gimignano, the town was a different experience during the day compared to early morning and evening, and we witnessed several 'small town' phenomena along the way too.

Our first day was spent wandering and getting to know our way around (not too difficult considering its size). However, we had another key experience, once again because of the unreliability of Marshall's pants pockets. This time our room key ended up falling off the wall of the city into the ancient Roman theater below, which turned out to be too dangerous for even the police to go retrieve (and, yes, I did ask them to). Instead, I had to explain to the seminary (fortunately not in my broken Italian) what happened to their key. . .

Besides the second 'key incident,' the rest of the first day was okay. We found a decent sized supermarket for our day trip meals and dinners before heading to bed, which turned out to be the most unpleasant part of the day. Apparently bed support isn't too important to the priests and students that live at the seminary, but that, along with our bug infestation, proved to be the ultimate cause of our sleep deprivation for the next three days. When we finally arrived in Florence Marshall ended up crashing at around 7pm the day of our arrival and slept till 7am the next day.

Our second day we had a long day trip planned for the well-known tuscan town,Pisa, and much lesser-known Lucca. The final full day was just for Volterra shopping and relaxing before heading on to museum-hopping Florence early the last day. That's it for now! Ciao!