We are now on the train to Florence. It's about a 2 hour fast train ride through Tuscan countryside. The Tuscan landscape is lush with the odd castle here and there, usually atop a mountain, and usually near a small village. We are sitting alongside 2 architectural engineer students from Penn State university who are on a 7 week study tour to Italy- hard life! They give us the heads up on Siena, just outside Florence, which may be worth visiting while we are still in the area. They will also be visiting Dubrovnik , so we share our amazement at the beauty of the Croatian coastline. Everyone around me is sleeping, except me, so I guess I'll just keep on blogging and taking in the bountiful tuscan farmland that I can see from the train.
We are now passing through Bologna, which we have heard has experienced 3 major earthquakes nearby in the past few months. At one stage, all the trains through Bologna were cancelled because of this. We are thankful that all trains are now again operational, otherwise we may have been stuck in Venice for awhile... How sad that would have been! From the train, I can see that Bologna is a bit more "urban" than some of the other Italian cities we have passed through. There are many high rise apartment buildings and quite a bit of construction is going on here and you don't get the sense of history that you experience elsewhere in Italy.