Siena: Siena is car free. You can drive to car parks on the outskirts and walk into the city or take a bus from Florence. Here are some photos.
Entrance into the city
For being car-free, there were a lot of cars (the volume of which, however, diminished towards the center)
Central Siena: Piazza Del Campo
Piazza Del Campo and the Torre Del Mangio. 400 steps to the top. Normally, I climb these things but Siena was just too hot in August to do so. I took a lot of pictures of it but it's really a magnicent building. [img]http://Elsewhere in Piazza Del Campo
Siena Duomo
Countryside
Last edited by Highlander on Fri Feb 04, 2011 5:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
San Gimignano: A much smaller town than Siena but with incredible medieval towers
Pedestrian entrance into town. We drove from Ponta Sieve and probably had to walk a good mile from an overflow parking area on the outskirts of town. This can be a busy place.
Pisa
Grieve in Chianti and more countryside
Below is the skyline of San Gimignano from a distance
Last edited by Highlander on Fri Feb 04, 2011 5:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Anyone else see those towers and instinctively want to climb up them and then jump off into a haystack?
"It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic." -- Ben Franklin
Wow. I visited Italy 2.5 years ago and spent 3 days in Tuscany and only one of them outside of Florence. We went to Pisa and after looking at those pictures, I must say, we made the wrong decision. Seeing the leaning tower was a fun experience (I kept thinking of bizarro Superman coming in and straightening it) but San Gimignano and Sienna look amazing. Great Pictures.
I love the vintage look of the photos. Disposable camara or cellphone?
EDIT: I see in the other thread that these are vintage film photos.
I visited the Tuscan region in '03 and '07 for 3 weeks each. Life doesn't get much better than this.
slimwhitman wrote:
I love the vintage look of the photos. Disposable camara or cellphone?
EDIT: I see in the other thread that these are vintage film photos.
I visited the Tuscan region in '03 and '07 for 3 weeks each. Life doesn't get much better than this.
Argh!! I hope they don't look cellphone quality! I took these with a Canon AE-1 back in August 2003 on a 3 week swing through the area while living in Scandinavia. Perhaps you appear inadvertantly in one of the photos. I have a really good professional scanner but I had trouble keeping the color quality up when scanning for some reason and probably added too much color back in accounting for the grainy vintage appearance of some of the photos.
Highlander wrote:
Argh!! I hope they don't look cellphone quality! I took these with a Canon AE-1 back in August 2003 on a 3 week swing through the area while living in Scandinavia. Perhaps you appear inadvertantly in one of the photos. I have a really good professional scanner but I had trouble keeping the color quality up when scanning for some reason and probably added too much color back in accounting for the grainy vintage appearance of some of the photos.
I think they came out great! Whatever you did was just right. This one is my favorite:
“Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains rather than do an immoral act.” —Thomas Jefferson (1785)
Highlander wrote:
Argh!! I hope they don't look cellphone quality! I took these with a Canon AE-1 back in August 2003 on a 3 week swing through the area while living in Scandinavia. Perhaps you appear inadvertantly in one of the photos. I have a really good professional scanner but I had trouble keeping the color quality up when scanning for some reason and probably added too much color back in accounting for the grainy vintage appearance of some of the photos.
They don't look cellphone quality to me. The yellowish tint though was what gave away the fact that they were conventional film though.
Still good quality shots and awesome setting.
It almost hurts to look at the photos. I saw a couple of favorite cafe's. Also the shot of the shops in Grieve made me drool over the grocery/butcher that was in one of the frames. Their produce and meat was astoundingly high-quality (far better than I routinely can find here) and relatively cheap.
Agree with two notes made: one it doesn't get better than this, and Lucca is a fabulous city to experience. A different feel from other Italian cities. Few tourists and less english spoken than I generally experienced. Made me a better visitor. If ever there, be sure to experience the wall promenade on weekend evenings.
[img]http://Elsewhere in Piazza Del Campo
