Monday, 12/26

• breakfast: leftover piece of bread; cappuccino
• pistachios
• lunch: two slices reheated pizza, one with pink, crumbly sausage, one with eggplant
• coffee gelato
• coffee
• dinner: bresaola, arugula, and parmesan salad; pizza with ham and radicchio; wine

Italian cappuccino is really good, even in train stations.

We took the slow and cheap train to Florence. Italy is a lot hillier than Hungary.

The pizza at lunch was the thick, square kind. The slice with sausage wasn't bad; the sausage and crust, at least, were good. The eggplant slice had been sitting around for much too long and was no good.

After being turned away from one place for dinner, we were accepted at another, where my pronunciation of the word "due" was apparently so convincing that we were given the menu not in English, but in Italian. The bresaola was terrific, drier and less salty than yesterday's. The salad was a bit much for one person to eat. The pizza was imperfect. I had ordered it for the radicchio on it, which didn't disappoint; the cheese, ham, and crust did, unfortunately. The pizza's biggest problem was that it had too much cheese piled onto it, which made the crust soggy in the middle.

I haven't been mentioning the wine, but the Italian house wine is always good. Everywhere I've been, it's been light enough that I could drink it like soda. I haven't had the white, just the red.