"Everybody" supposedly loves this medieval city, and certainly there's a lot to enjoy, but finding our hotel was way more of a chore than it had to be. Serves us right, I suppose, for trusting venere.com, which was great for reservations but awful for directions. "Just off the highway." Hah! If you're a pedestrian trying to find landmarks, Siena is the best of the Italian cities we visited. But if you're a motorist trying to find your hotel or even your way out of town, you'll be befuddled by the confusing and contradictory signs. Although cars have supposedly been banned from the center of the city since the mid 1960s, you still had to be on the lookout for commercial vehicles that part the seas of people wandering the streets. And motorists like us trying to find our hotel!
The best revenge for arduous driving is good food. We had a great dinner tonight (We deserved it!) at Ristorante Guidoriccio, just off Il Campo, the shell-shaped main square lined with cafes. (I've never read that Boston's brutalist City Hall Plaza was supposed to evoke Il Campo, but to us it does. Maybe the Hub's plaza just needs some nice cafes to humanize it.) Anyway, the family-run Guidoriccio had some of the most artfully-presented food we've had, including a crostini appetizer with unusual toppings including fresh tomato, ground sausage and a ground vegetable spread --- so beautiful that I had to get a picture of it. The only disappointment was the house red wine, but admittedly our palates had been spoiled by the visit to Poggio-Torselli earlier in the day.
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