Via francigena 2024 - Page 5

Siena - Bologna - Munich - Chemnitz

In the morning, fresh bread rolls were hung on our room door and a coffee machine was also there, so we had our first breakfast in the room. Today was our last day. We wanted to take plenty of time for Siena. We were still limited, Manu with her broken toe, me with the infection, it would have taken us too long to walk the actually not very long distance. So we walked down into the valley to the bus station and took the bus to our destination. Once we arrived in Siena, we immediately started our tour of discovery through this beautiful town. We strolled from the Basilica Cateriniana di S. Domenico to the Piazza del Campo with the Palazzo Pubblico. Here we had an expresso for €3, everything else here was priced out of this world.

Now I slowly wanted to go to the cathedral, I remembered that I was enormously impressed by the building 10 years ago. And now it was the same. It's hard to describe, it's just beautiful. It wasn't that crowded here shortly after midday, we enjoyed the atmosphere in the Piazza del Duomo for a long time. We also took turns looking at the masterpiece from the inside. In the meantime, a street musician was playing a stringed instrument I didn't recognize.

Manu then had to go to the post office, which turned out to be an obscure procedure for simply sending a few cards abroad. Afterwards, we walked around the Fortezza Medicea, a Medici fortress, for a while. The views from here over Tuscany were fantastic. Our accommodation, a B&B, was 200m from Il Campo, but it still took us almost 30 minutes to find it due to the winding alleyways and poorly functioning GPS signal. We unloaded our backpacks here and continued on our tour. Passing Il Campo once again, we tried to imagine how the horse race (Il Palio) could take place here in this small square. Pure spectacle 🙂. In the late afternoon, we stocked up on everything we needed at the Alimentarii and went up to our roof terrace at dusk. We couldn't let it get that late today, our first Flixbus left very early for home.

Early in the morning, we walked the half hour out of the old town to Siena train station. We traveled about 2 hours to Bologna. We had a 3-hour layover there and used it to have breakfast and then stroll around the city center. Then we took the 2nd Flixbus to Munich. Another 8 hours, our legs were already falling asleep 🙄. On the way there was always trouble, as a young guy smoked in the bus toilet and showed little consideration for sleeping children or passengers. The landscape before and after the Brenner Pass was of course gigantic, and we knew large parts of it, especially the Adige Valley, from our cycle tour over the Alps on the Via claudia augusta. Nevertheless, we could only enjoy it to a limited extent. We hardly knew how to sit. We had to leave the bus in Kufstein, border control. Finally some exercise for the old bones 🙂.

When we finally arrived in Munich, we had already chosen an Augustiner-Bräu beer garden, where we had a proper dinner and made the whole journey more bearable with a beer. Nevertheless, we still had to suffer another 6 hours on the 3rd Flixbus to Chemnitz, then we had managed that too and took the first streetcar home in the morning. A hike that didn't quite go as planned came to an end. But improvisation is also an art 🙂.