After a sleepless night at a sizzling hotel room in Grenoble, we spent five hours on trains to Firenze. We chose to go to Grenoble a night before the start of the trip, since our train to Chambéry left so early. There we had a one-hour wait for the train to Torino Porta Susa, luckily in the air-conditioned station building. It was quite different in Porta Susa, since the station is practically a huge outdoor space, only the (few) shops are cooled. The train ride to Firenze was scorching due to lack of proper air-conditioning.
Most of the posts about this vacation will be practically photo galleries, since nothing much exciting happened. We started the first morning, like many other mornings, with a run to Parco delle Cascine by the river Arno. We had no good idea where to go and what to see in Firenze, so we just aimlessly wandered to the direction of the river and the Boboli Gardens on the other side of it. We had a very long and hot walk back to the apartment by a racecourse. We could not believe our eyes when we saw a phone booth, actually several of them, that seemed to be still in use.
Our second day in Firenze started with a run as well, this time to Parco di San Donato, a small but hilly residential park in Novoli neighborhood: the statue with two kids playing with their phones on the children’s playground made a valid point.
We spent the rest of the day strolling around the touristy city center visiting the most remarkable sights, mostly cathedrals, without queuing to any of them. It was getting very (too) hot so we were lucky to find ourselves eventually at the terminus of the tram line that took us back to the apartment. Fresh basil in pots was abundantly available in Italian supermarkets so we decided to make some tomato-mozzarella salad with the dinner. Imagine our surprise when cutting the corner of the plastic pouch of the mozza ball to let the water out we found nothing left inside. The supermarket clerk was equally perplexed, and did not hesitate to give us another ball.
From Firenze our trip continued the following morning to Pisa to catch the flight to Helsinki.