Short Version: lots of beautiful scenery, churches, renaissance, roman culture, expensive dinners, beautiful women, art, gelateria (ice cream shops :D), an overdose of Americans and Dutchmen, beer, vino, knoore, pannekoeke, sjeel gezeever, one beautiful opera, warm weather and finally beautiful women (did I say lots of them?) For the long version read on…
On Sunday 30th of September Rob, D’r Lange (Ramon my Brother) and I started our journey towards Italy from Eindhoven airport after a journey by train without events. We left with Ryan Air at 14:55 and arrived two hours later in Pisa. Much to our surprise, our coats, brought from the chilly Netherlands, were definitely not needed since the temperature was around 25-29 degrees Celcius, hence beautiful weather 
Of course, travelling with my good friend Rob, I expected him to get into trouble one way or the other (after two holidays with him already, I ‘m already experienced in this kind of stuff and know I should really watch after him)…However, I did not expect him to get into trouble already 5 minutes after we’ve landed. Rob, always curious, decided he wanted to have a closer look at an airplane engine because according to him “he never seen one so close”, much to the dislike of the Italian air stewards. So after hearing some shouting and swearing in Italian, I turned around and was already expecting the cause of it…and yes I was right 
Luckily, Rob was not in big trouble and we could continue our journey into the centre of Pisa, we decided to get off the bus at the main train station, Pisa Hauptbahnhof so to say and try to figure out where the hell our hotel was located…it should be near the train station they said…after asking around a bit we took another bus that delivered us somewhere at the boundary of Pisa to Hotel Bonnano, to our nice surprise a four star Hotel with nice rooms, satellite tv (mainly italian and arab…) and a mini bar I think this was the best hotel we had during the holidays. And yes, it was indeed near a train station but not near the central station, it took us another day to find out. After getting refreshed we decided to have a quick reconnaissance of the city/town and after a fifteen minute arrived at Piazza Maccaroni, err Miracoli which has about all the things worth seeing in Pisa, the tower and a beautiful cathedral, see the picture below. Since we hadn’t eaten in quite some time, we soon decided, after the usual amount of sight seeing, to get a pizza and some beer somewhere.
Next day, we went to beautiful Lucca. Last time when I visited Toscany I did not have chance to visit this town but heard it was definitely worth the visit, and so it was! Lucca is a small city, not as impressive as Firenze (Florence) or Roma but with a lot of character, a nice ambience so to say. For example it has a beautiful cathedral, a tower with trees growing on top of it, a typically styled bell tower and lots of little squares with nicely coloured buildings that are connected by small alley ways. This gives the town a rustic kind of feeling and I could not help but feel at home there, it reminded me of a town like Valkenburg here in Limburg. On other curiosity of Lucca is that it has a Piazza (square) that has been build on top of the remnants of a Roman theatre, which gives the square the typical shape of an ellipse. Unfortunately, nothing could be seen of the old Roman history, which for me is one of the most impressive aspects of Italy; the remainders of a more than two-thousand year old civilisation which are still so visible today.
The third day of our holiday in Italy, we’ve left Pisa for the second big part of our journey, bella Firenze! After leaving our hotel we first decided to head again for Piazza Miracoli for a visit to the cathedral, which we saw only from the outside. I’m lucky we made that choice, because the inside of the cathedral was amongst the most beautiful I saw in Italy. In total Pisa can be visited and seen in about two hours, and while it’s definitely worth the visit, I would advise you, would you want to visit Toscany, to get a hotel somewhere else if only for a somewhat bigger night life. I think we spent nearly two hours at Pisa’s biggest square before deciding to pick up our luggage at our hotel and head for Firenze… something that will be left for the next post….