Day One, Florentine Adventure

We began our day the usual way: Alex getting woken up by the Tabac alarm system which woke everyone else up. A word of explanation: after the most recent break in at the Tabac, the resourceful Tabacconist screwed his side door shut and started entering through the main door. This trips the alarm every morning, and despite our asking for them to do something about it, they have cheerfully responded that there is nothing to be done, accompanied with the ubiquitous French Shrug. I'm not sure what his game is, other than being a dick, but I have a feeling that he is trying to get us to complain to the rental company so that the rental company will have to repair his door rather than him. I guess we will have to oblige him at some point if we want Alex to get full night's sleep. Anyway, we packed up the car and were out of the door by 9:30. There was a little snow and ice on the road from the previous two days of snowfall, but we now had snow tires on the car and it felt solid. In any case, the autoroutes were all well plowed. We drove through the Maurienne and past all the classic cols beckoning to me to be cycled, through the Frejus tunnel, around various ring roads and the maddeningly poorly organized toll plazas and finally into Florence. All told, with a motorway stop for food it took seven hours.

I had found a great looking place on Tripadvisor (The Villa Antea), which we had booked last week, and we were eager to see if it lived up to the photos and ratings. After getting a bit lost in the maze of one way streets around the Villa, we finally arrived. The courtyard and lobby were gorgeous, but I still was not sold, having been to several hotels with opulent lobbies but rooms out of Noir movies (mostly in Paris). When we were shown to our room however, I was extremely pleasantly surprised. I'll let the photos do the talking:



After de-luggaging, we walked around a bit, visited a nice coin store and then had pizza at an excellent local restaurant. I had the pizzaiolo special, which included had an assortment of flavors, including potato-onion, sauscisse, margarita and a something else. It was all excellent. Chloe got a vegetarian pizza: laaaame. After pizza, it was back to the hotel and collapsing in exhaustion.