Day 4
On our Thursday in Florence, we took a long 12-hour day trip to the Tuscan countryside with Avanti. We loaded onto a 70-person bus and set off early in the morning for a few different stops. The program was in both Spanish and English (“a free Spanish lesson” as our guide said). While I enjoyed the program they had for us, I definitely felt our Cinque Terre tour was more personalized and intimate, naturally with only 6 people aboard.
Siena
Tuscany lunch
San Gimignano
Pisa
Dinner
We arrived back in Florence at 8 p.m., starving. We stopped at a wood fire oven pizza place along a bustling street Via Faenza. It was very lively with lots of people eating outside, bright lights from storefronts and even an accordion player wandering down the street.
This was my best pizza in Italy, which isn’t a hard list to beat. But I had a type of pizza bianca with sausage, potatoes and tomatoes — wonderful in flavor and soft texture. The potatoes tasted great, roasted, but I enjoyed eating them off of the pizza instead of on it since they were heavy.
Our night finished with strolling 20 minutes back to our hotel, making our way through streets at night. My favorite times of day are morning and night, and Via Faenza is one of the best streets to experience, though Florence as a whole certainly has a better energetic evening atmosphere than other Italian cities.
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