After four days in Rome, we took an intercity train that was covered by our Eurail pass to Florence, capital of Tuscany. We spent two full days in this beautiful city, which was our second destination in Italy!

If you are interested to know, we got the 1st class Eurail Global Pass which allowed us to explore up to 24 European countries for 15 days continuously.

It was our very first time boarding a train with all our luggages and the entire experience was quite novel. Anyway, our seats were pre-assigned to us upon reserving our tickets at the train station. Reservation fee varies from city to city.

After travelling for about 3 hours, we finally reached Florence! Had quite a difficult time locating our place of lodging even though it’s actually quite near the train station. Not only that, the pavements were so uneven that we thought the wheels of our luggages might fall off from all that dragging around! We dumped our stuff in our room and took the next regional train to Pisa. Journey lasted for more than an hour.

The weather was pretty bad when we reached Piazza dei Miracoli. It started to drizzle a little and it was impossible for us to take photos without getting our camera lenses wet. Seeked shelter in the souvenir shop and thankfully, the rain stopped after a while.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa! 😀 It costs €18 per person to ascend the tower and only 10 people are allowed to go up every 20 minutes.

We bought tickets at €5 per person to enter the Baptistery of St John, which is the largest baptistery in Italy. It also included free admission into the Duomo.

Bronze sculpture of St John.

Duomo di Pisa. Very very lovely cathedral.

I absolutely love this photo! 😀

As we were about to leave, we caught sight of and were amused by all these youngsters doing silly poses in front of the tower!

I guess silliness is infectious because we started to join in the fun as well! 😛

Took the train in the late afternoon and by the time we reached Florence, it was time for dinner! We decided not to wander too far from our B&B and settled for Le Fonticine which had been awarded 4.5 out of 5 stars by TripAdvisor.

The food served here was simply divine! I had the Linguine in Cod Fish Creamy Sauce (€8) which is a specialty of Florence while misterchewy had the Risotto with Savoy Cabbage and Duck Sauce (€9). Service was top notch too. Highly recommended.

We stayed at Sette Angeli Rooms for two nights. As mentioned earlier, the location is not bad. However, there is no elevator. And the stairs are very steep! The husband was cursing and swearing under his breath when he hauled his luggage up the stairs earlier in the day. Luckily the reception guy offered to help carry mine up.

The next morning was a beautiful one for sightseeing but we went shopping at The Mall instead! LOL. Kiasu us being very kiasu, we bought our shuttle bus tickets the night before at the BUSITALIA/SITA depot (pickup and drop-off point). It cost us €5 per person for a one-way trip. Boarded the earliest bus at 8.50am and close to one hour later, we reached The Mall! 😀

The entire place was so peaceful and quiet, unlike any of those Great Singapore Sales nonsense. Except for the Prada store! See below. LOL.

If my memory doesn’t fail me, Prada opens at 10am. There was already a queue waiting to get in and these people are from you-know-where. I swear my heart did a little cheer when the shutter was finally being pulled up. Haha.

A number of bags caught my eye and I finally settled for just one 😛 Plus key pouches for misterchewy and myself. I think I took only about an hour for all my purchases?

The next bus from The Mall to Florence was at 1pm so we took our time to check out other brands. Wanted to get a YSL clutch but the color I wanted was out of stock 🙁

Grabbed lunch at the cafe!

The husband knows that I like hot chocolate and had been feeding me plenty of it for the past few days! Kinda developed a little sore throat after that. >_<

Piazza del Duomo

Santa Maria del Fiore is the main church of Florence.

This is the largest brick dome ever constructed.

Huge clock decorated by Paolo Uccello.

St. Giovanni Baptistery

Piazza della Signoria

Replica of Michelangelo’s David. Prior to this, we saw the actual masterpiece at Accademia Gallery! Needless to say, it was an absolute fine piece of work. Photography is prohibited though.

We didnt enter Palazzo Vecchio as it was about to close by the time we got in.

Popped into Ristorante Dante e Beatrice for dinner on our way back. It’s strange. Ever since we touched down in Italy, I fell in love with tomato-based spaghetti. I used to be a huge fan of cream-based pastas but I found myself ordering tomato-based ones most of the time while in Italy! Not hormones changing right? LOL.

The husband was kinda disappointed with his ravioli 🙁

Before we eat, must Instagram first! Haha! We were amused that our white wine was served in a small jug.

Night market near our B&B!

We woke up early the next morning and visited the Uffizi Gallery before setting off for Venice. Yes, that is what our next post will be all about. If I had to choose only one city to revisit in Italy, it would be Venice! Connect with us on Facebook www.facebook.com/missuschewy and on Instagram @missuschewy and @misterchewy 😀 TGIF chewys!