Soeurope in Siena

The last leg of my journey through Italy was Siena, the town where Jenna is doing her study abroad.

Siena is actually not much more than a town. Only about 50,000 people live there. It's a beautiful, peaceful medieval city, and it was a nice change of pace from busy Rome and Florence.

Getting to Siena wasn't a very long train ride away from Florence. Jenna met me at my hotel, and our first activity was carving a pumpkin! It was the day before Halloween, after all. We met up with Jenna's roommate at their host family's house, and then looked for a place outside to do it.

They live right in the heart of Siena, which was cool! So for probably the only time in our lives, we  carved a pumpkin sitting on the steps of a statue in a pretty little courtyard.

Okay, I didn't actually help carve the pumpkin. It was already starting to rot and there was no way I was touching that thing.

After that, me and Jenna went to the Piazza del Campo, the main town square of Siena, for dinner. We felt like it was a very romantic setting. Candle, and all.

The pasta we had was delicious, but at first we thought the portions were too small. On our way back to my hotel, we got a second course of pizza from a take-out place. And we were still hungry right up until we paid for the pizza. Then we were suddenly magically full, and the pizza ended up going right in the fridge for the next day.

The next day, Halloween, Jenna had a meeting at her school in the morning. It was fun to get to see where she goes to class every day. After that, we had a pretty chill day and just wandered around Siena a little more. We got some pictures of the Pizza del Campo in the daylight.

Later, we stopped by the BYU Halloween party. To celebrate some more, we did this:

These masks are famous for Carnevale in Venice, but we figured Halloween in Siena was close enough. We did see a few little kids running around in costumes, but there weren't any other adults dressed up. People didn't seem to think we were too weird, though. We got some "bellissimas" thrown our way.

The next day, Friday, we started out the day at Siena's Duomo.

This is me showing how much I love this cathedral like a weirdo.

We also went to the Baptistry, which is attached to the Duomo. I feel like separate baptistries must be an Italian thing, because I don't remember ever seeing these in France.

This was our favorite sculpture in there, obviously.

Outside!

I put an exclamation mark because I'm clearly excited in this picture.

We had big plans to have a sister shopping day for the rest of the day, but it didn't work out. The Marissa look was just NOT in in Siena. My dream to have Italian shoes died a painful death. I can only hope it comes true someday. 

Instead, we had another relaxing day. I walked around and took a bunch of pictures of the medieval streets.

At night, we stopped by one more church. I don't remember what it was called, but I do remember that it's the home of St. Catherine's head, so that was exciting.

We needed more pizza after that, so we went back once again to the Piazza del Campo, this time with Jenna's roommate Brittany!

This restaurant made the perfect pizza for me. It was just cheese. 4 different kinds of cheese, to be exact. There wasn't even any tomato sauce! Eating this made up for my lack of new shoes just a little bit.

It looks like Jenna enjoyed her pizza too :)

So that concluded my trip to Siena. I did stay one more night, but we didn't spend any time in Siena the next day. We spent the day in Pisa! Stay tuned for some awkward but pretty awesome pictures from that adventure.