Our plan for the day got upended when we realized in the early afternoon that Tim’s booking of a guided walking tour at 3:00…had not actually gotten booked! But, the day worked out okay, anyway.
We headed out of the flat a little after 8:30 to grab breakfast. Google failed us again (a consistent theme on this trip), in that the breakfast spot we headed to was…closed. But, there are plenty of cafes around, so we stopped at another one nearby for a couple of pastries and coffee.
After breakfast, we grabbed a couple of electric bikes for a brisk 10-minute ride to the start of what is considered the longest covered walkway in the world: the Portico di San Luca. It’s a 3.8 km continuously covered walkway that gains 215 m of elevation over its run of 666 arches. It was a pleasant walk both there and back, and, at the top, we poked around the Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca, including climbing up into the dome and having a look back over the city.
Once we returned to the bottom of the portico, we grabbed electric bikes and headed back into the center of the old city, stopping buy the tourism office to book (for real) a walking guided tour for the next day, and doing a bit of poking around for obscure-ish sites from Atlas Obscura: the demon’s head, the three arrows (although there are now only two), and a walk through the archaeological remains underneath the library. That got us to a respectable time for lunch…so we ate!
We headed back to the flat for a couple of hours of coding, reading, and relaxation before heading back out for our 5:30 appointment to climb Asinelli Tower—the taller (and much straighter!) of the Two Towers. It was 60m high when first completed in the 12th century, but was added onto later such that it is now 97.2m tall and far and away the tallest structure in the city center. 498 steep, well-worn, and irregular in both rise and run, steps, passing through four intermediate floors/platforms took us to the top, where the views were, indeed, spectacular. The steps are so narrow that there are attendants coordinating when different groups of people need to stop on a platform on their way down for whichever group is ascending. Overall, pretty cool, if just a little harrowing!
We took a meandering path back up to Parco della Montagnola, which we’d visited the previous night, when it was both a little sketchy, hard to appreciate the odd sculptures around the fountain, and pretty buggy (for Benton; Tim’s old man skin seems to no longer attract insects). Then, it was, ostensibly, off to find a place to grab drinks before dinner. Somehow, when we are looking for places with food, we seem to come across scads of bars that are really just drinks, and when we were looking for a place with just drinks…we kept only finding full-on restaurants!
Eventually, we found a place and had a couple of drinks. We were so close to our flat that Benton ducked out after we ordered to go take his clothes inside that he had put out to dry after doing laundry, as we knew rain was coming. The drinks were good…so we ordered a second round as the rain started, and went ahead and ordered some meats and cheeses and bread. By the time we were done, we realized we had essentially…eaten dinner.
We needed to kill a little more time, so we returned to the three arrows to see if they had lights pointed at them (we thought we’d seen that earlier in the day…and were wrong; no lights) and then did a repeat on a gelato shop that a locally based friend of Tim’s had recommended (and which we’d initially sampled the previous day). THAT got us close to 9:30, so we headed to Piazza Maggiore. When we had passed by earlier in the day, we had seen a big movie screen and seats set up throughout the square and realized that they would be showing Woody Allen’s 1987 movie, Radio Days, at 9:30 (Diane Keaton, Danny Aiello, Seth Green, Jeff Daniels, Larry David, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest,…). We weren’t planning to stay and watch the whole thing, but we were curious as to whether it would be shown in English or with Italian dubbing. As it turned out, it was raining, so the screen just had a message saying they’d start when the rain passed. The radar said the rain wasn’t going to pass for a good, long while…so we abandoned that plan and called it a night.
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: the generally precarious feeling of the stairs at Asinelli tower, and then the last run of stairs at each landing at being super steep with super narrow treads; getting the nonsensical T-shirt that reads “Focused Reality Concepts”
Tim: watching the guy totally wipe out on his bike right in front of us, but doing so “with good form” according to Benton—it was a complete wipeout…but he popped right up, gave us a thumbs-up, and got back on the bike and road down the street; the first electric city bike this morning that had a pedal arm that was so bent that it hit the frame on every revolution—still rideable, but annoying.
