Pistoia

10/10

We finished the last load of laundry (the washer cycle is over 2 hours!) and the landlord came by to check on the continued drip. He worked on that, fixed the bathroom door that wouldn't close and then we were free to go to Pistoia. I wanted to go to the nursery I had seen on our way to Vinci which had all the topiaries. I had seen a sign that said "open to public" (in Italian) so off we went. Turns out that there seemed to be no way into the nursery and when we asked, we were told it was CLOSED that day. Undeterred, we continued on to Pistoia. Since it's a fairly large city we thought that parking at the train station would be easy to locate with the GPS. Wrong....there was NO parking left there so we went to a public park, found a space and walked towards the duomo. On the way, we passed a small cafe and decided to have lunch before our touristing began. We had a terrific meal of seafood pasta for me and strozzpretti pasta with sausage and porcini for Dick. The house wines were the best we had had! Both white for me and the red for Dick were excellent. It had been a couple days since my last gelato so we found a gelateria to nourish me on my continued walk.
On the way to the duomo, we saw a sign for an exhibition of a  Della Robbia that had been renovated and was in a church with very old frescoes on the walls. The statue, "The Annunciation" was beautiful and there was a video on the renovation process that was very interesting.

In the duomo, there was another Della Robbia.

Back of the duomo. Interesting architecture

Della Robbia without blue

Front of duomo

Bell tower

We made our way back to our home town to check out a pizzeria we had seen for the possibility of takeout pizza for dinner. When we arrived back at the apartment, the landlord greeted us and gave us a bottle of nice Maremma red wine in sympathy for the fires in the California wine country. We ordered takeout pizza and had a perfectly good dinner of pizza and wine.