Friday was a no-travel day, dedicated to seeing Siena. After the small towns we’ve been in, the city feels huge. Our accommodation is a lovely B&B with 15 foot ceilings and a truly lovely breakfast featuring freshly baked goods made by our hostess. It made a good start for a day of gentle tourism. We all went a bit camera crazy, so prepare for a photo-packed post in which not a lot happens.

After breakfast, we walked from our B&B, which is set in a quiet residential neighborhood across a big ravine from the main tourist hustle and bustle, to our main morning objective, the Duomo. It’s a big tourist destination, with a line to get in as they control the number of people inside. But it’s a dazzler.

And the striped outside is just the beginning of the serious artistic craft in this place. Inside, there are incredible mosaic floors, gorgeous marble carvings, and paintings of religious scenes, all piled together in layers.

Everywhere you turn, there’s something to see. And the crowd is pretty well-managed, with room to move around but with a clear path around the space to move people through so they don’t stay for hours. Just check out the floor mosaic in detail.

And the abstract patterns on floors and doors are also amazing.

Off to one side, there is a room of illuminated vellum books, which, with their very large type, are communal hymnals used by monks. These books are something like 30 inches high.

After the main chapel space, we also visited the crypts below, which were visible from the chapel through a few plexiglass squares in the floor. The crypt really shows how this cathedral is layered with building at various points in history, growing and adapting and sometimes just burying old parts of the church complex under new construction.

And the crypt includes this remarkable reliquary, a display case for bone fragments collected from a variety pack of saints.

After we’d become saturated with seeing so much history and art, we walked around the city a bit more, then picked up simple sandwiches on our way back to our B&B, where we had a pleasant lunch in the backyard. Tim and I retired for most of the afternoon, for reading and napping. Karen, on a mission to find a scarf in the pattern of one of the city district flags, went out again.

We reconnected for dinner, this one on a reservation we had made in advance. It was delicious, and the waiter was really playing up the “does the beautiful lady like the wine?” kind of stuff. We played along happily.

And to cap of the evening, on our way back to our B&B, we ran into a party on the street, which seemed to be for the kids’ soccer team? Something like that.

A perfect end to a lovely day in Siena.