Florence: Rain, Leonardo and a Train Ticket Problem (2/4)
From the Travel with Sheridan archives: This story comes from my 2007 Europe trip. Places, prices and logistics reflect the trip as I experienced it then.
We packed up in Rome and headed for the train station. This was my first experience using Eurail passes, and I was about to discover that there were a few things I hadn't completely understood when I bought them. They had to be purchased outside the EU and validated once we arrived, and depending on the pass, you couldn't necessarily use it on every train going where you wanted to go. None of that caused us much trouble on the way to Florence. Coming back would be another story.
For now, we settled in for the couple-hour ride north, reading, dozing and watching the Italian countryside go by. It wasn't a particularly glamorous train, but the ride was smooth and the conductors were fairly nice—as long as you had all your tickets in order. We arrived in Florence without incident and took a taxi to our hotel, a decent little place within walking distance of the Duomo.
Our visit to Florence was rainy, but that didn't take away from the beauty other than masking some of the light. We wandered through the San Lorenzo Street Market looking at leather bags, wallets, statues and glass, then spent time doing what I enjoy in cities like this—turning up random streets to see where they went. We found little parks, statues and churches along the way without necessarily setting out to find any of them.
We also stopped at the Leonardo da Vinci museum, where we could see some of his designs and inventions. The more you learn about him, the more his brilliance shines through.
At one point during our wandering, I stopped to take a photograph of an interesting building and suddenly found myself being yelled at by an armed Italian police officer. Apparently it was a restricted government building that I wasn't supposed to photograph, though I hadn't seen the sign. It was kind of interesting having an armed man yelling at you about photos—in Italian—when you had absolutely no idea what he was saying. Thankfully, a passerby translated for me.
Our brief jaunt to Florence ended the next day when we took a cab back to the train station and my incomplete understanding of the rail passes finally caught up with me. We'd missed the train our passes covered, and although there were other trains heading back to Rome, the next one we could take without changing anything wasn't leaving for another four hours. I wasn't particularly interested in spending four hours sitting in the Florence train station, so I started asking questions and discovered I could upgrade our passes and put us on another train leaving in about an hour.
That train also happened to be an express, and for a few euros more I went for business class. Instead of waiting four hours and then spending another four hours on the train, we left about an hour later and were back in Rome in roughly two hours, with more comfortable seats in the bargain. We spent the night in Rome and then caught our flight to Athens the next day.
