Fiesole.

Back at Fiesole, we have a very good meal at a recommended restaurant.  The staff is not quite charming, but they're very busy.

The next morning, at our hotel on the hill, the rain has begun in earnest.  No one is inclined to go to the big town in a downpour, and we instead check out the Etruscan / Roman ruins in Fiesole, and visit the associated museum.  The excavated amphitheatre, baths, and temple ruins appear to do double duty as community concert venue and outdoor gallery, and are festooned with many modern sculptures by the same artist.  They're nicely done, various torsos, heads, and hands artfully distressed, pierced, disarticulated, and with vaguely homosexual overtones.  We admire them but don't quite understand why they're here.

 The expensive museum tickets  (10 euros a head)  and a mediocre lunch with rude service (pasta, glass of wine and coffee costing each of us about 17 euros) leaves us thinking that this little town on the hill, formerly a "secret" refuge for savvy travelers, has now taken it's place as a full partner in the tourist trade of Florence.


Photos: The Roman amphitheatre, sporting a giant metal hand at its focus (just because); A gauntlet of hands leading a large head (what better to relate to an excavated bath complex); Two figures, two heads, that makes sense (point of view chosen to retain "kid-friendly" rating).