On Tuesday, July 21st, we woke up early and took a train from Genoa to Pisa. Mel and Joe stayed in Pisa for most of the day to sight-see, while Tressa and I caught another train to Florence. After arriving in Florence we immediately went to the Museo Fiorentino di Preistoria, just a stones throw from the Duomo, where I studied some of the material from the Romito site on Sicily. The museum was small but clearly well run, with an impressive articulated skeleton of a cave bear at the entrance of the exhibit hall. About a third of the museum was dedicated to the Italian Upper Paleolithic with the Romito 5 and 6 skeletons on display along with reconstructions of several other burials. The museum staff was absolutely 
wonderful to work with, and extremely interested to see a microscibe for the first time. After a long and lively discussion about microscribes, I finally got to work measuring some skulls. Conversation time however ended up costing me too much time though, and I realized that I would have to return on Wednesday morning to measure the last cranium (I really didn’t mind, it meant I got to see everyone again the next day). 
Getting to Sienna on Wednesday turned out to be a real adventure. Since I hadn’t finished with the Romito material on Tuesday, I had planned to return to the museum in Florence at around 8 am, measure the one remaining skull, and then pack up and catch an 11 am train to Sienna. This seemed like a pretty good plan on Tuesday night, as it saved me having to haul all my equipment across Florence to our hotel. It still seemed like a pretty good plan when I got up on Wednesday morning and had a great stress-free breakfast at our “way-to-nice for the money we’re paying” hotel. It did not, however, seem like such a good plan when I got completely lost in the backstreets of Florence with a really crappy map. So… I finally get to the museum around 9:30 am (yeah, I was really lost) with about one hour before I have to leave to get to the train station. I measure the skull, pack up, and at around 10:30 am ask the staff to call me a cab. The cab arrives almost immediately and I’m thinking “I’ve got this in the bag” (it’s about a 5 minute cab ride to the train station). What I didn’t realize was that the museum was on a really long one-way street, and it just happened to be trash day in Florence… and wouldn’t you know it, my cab is right behind the garbage truck, which is making stops about every 50 feet or so to pick up the trash. So after a mind (and budget) blowing 25 minute cab ride, I arrive at the train station with 5 minutes to spare, make a mad dash to the platform and get myself and my equipment on the train just as the doors are closing. So, at this point I’m thinking that the worst is over, it’s all down hill form here… Wrong. I had planned on getting lunch at the Florence train station and eating on the train, but due to the mad scramble, I had to wait until I got to Sienna at around 2:00pm. Turns out the Sienna train station is not full of restaurants like the Florence train station, and I end up with a nutritious lunch consisting of a Snickers and a Coke from the station gift shop. So after “lunch” I grab a cab because I need to get to the museum as fast as possible to have enough time to study the Paglicci 25 specimen.
It is at this point that I truly realize what a fool I was for scheduling stops in Italian cities in July, which is tourist season, other wise known as Hell on Earth. So my taxi driver is driving down these little back streets in Sienna which are about 6 feet wide and absolutely packed with tourists. None of which, apparently, realize that streets are where cars drive, because they are just milling around as if they own the place, and if a car wants to get by, well, they can just wait for them to take their family portrait in the middle of the street. Well, my cabbie completely loses it, and starts screaming and cussing at these morons as we slowly make our way through this town that doesn’t appear to have changed much since the Renaissance. After about 20 minutes I start to wonder if this guy actually knows what he’s doing because we seem to be turning left at every intersection, and don’t appear to be going in any real obvious direction. I can’t really voice any of my concerns however, partly because I don’t speak Italian, but mainly because of the ceaseless stream of obscenities he’s still spewing. Anyways, all of a sudden he hits the brakes, points to a door, and says “OK”. The door has a sign saying” Università degli Studi di Siena” on the door and I’m finally there.
The rest of the day was really great though. The institute staff were really friendly and really, really interested in my work. Several of the people working there were my age and they wanted to know all about where all my research had taken me and where I had left to go. It took my about an hour to finish studying the specimen, which seems like a ridiculously small amount of time compared to how much trouble it took to get there. Luckily, after explaining how I needed to take a train back to Florence, the director, Prof. Ronchitelli, tells me that that she actually lives in Florence, and that’s she’ll be happy just to drive me back to my hotel. Which she does, and for which I’m sure she has no idea how grateful I truly am.After returning from Sienna, we said good-bye to Mel and Joe on Thursday morning as they left for Naples, and spent the day sight-seeing in Florence while waiting for our night train to take us to Berlin. This was my one real sight-seeing day in Florence, but Tressa (who spent a semester in Florence in College) made sure that I got to see the major interests such as the Ponte Vecchio, the Piti Palace, the Boboli Gardens, the “piggy” market, and the Piazza Vecchio.
