Day 3 - Florence Pisa Rome

Today we woke up at 9am with the plan to climb to the top of the duomo. This turned out to be much more difficult than we thought. We literally ran around the whole church looking for the ticket office with no luck, we must've asked at least 9 people where the tickets were until we finally got an answer. It turns out the tickets were a block away in a little office hidden between restaurants and stores, it was not intuitive at all. We first started on the ground level of the church and then went into the basement to see all of the catacombs. The Inside of the church was huge and looking up at the paintings on dome was incredible.

After seeing the church we went to the exit to get to the top of the dome, thankfully the line was short so there wasn't much of a wait. Of course this turned out to be too good to be true, when we got to the gate they told us that we couldn't enter with our backpacks and would have to leave. We hurried back to our hostel to drop off the backpacks and then ran back to the dome (it was only a block away). The trip to drop the bags off couldn't have been more than a minute but when we get back to the dome entrance the line was much longer and worse it wasn't moving! We waited at least 20 minutes before they finally started letting people up and at this point we were getting very tight on time. To get to the top of the dome you had to take a narrow staircase all the way up and passing people was impossible high made the trip to the top very slow. Although it was slow the views on the way up of the inside of the dome and the views of the City from the top of the dome made it completely worth it! 

The only problem was it was almost time to get our train. We ended up having to push pasty people on the way down and sprint back to our hostel, grab the bags, and jog all the way to the train station in order to catch the train with just 3 minutes to spare!

The train ride to Pisa was smooth and took about 1 hour. It was a nice to be able to relax for a bit. Wen we arrived in Pisa we had to walk about a mile to get to the leaning tower. The tower was so incredible in person, I can't believe it hasn't fallen over yet! Of course we had to take the obligatory holding the tower up pics along with some other creative poses. 

After hanging around the tower for about an hour we went to a nearby restaurant to get some lunch. I had a penne pasta and Rachel had a grilled calamari. My food was good, but Rachel's was even more so. 

After eating we made our way back to the train station ( this time walking). The train from Pisa to Rome took about 4 hours and had some really good views of the coast and countryside.

When we arrived in Rome we made our way to the hostel which was really close to the train station. After showering and changing we decided to take the metro to trevi fountain. To our dismay the entire fountain was being restored, there was no water in it at all! We were really disheartened. We ended up eating at a nearby restaurant that was really delicious! Rachel and I split a pizza and a bottle of the house wine. After dinner we ended up walking back to our hostel which was only about a mile and a half away.