The Most Beautiful Place in all of Italy...

This weekend, my friends and I had originally planned to go to Viareggio for Carnivale. Although everyone talks about how crazy and awesome the Carnivale in Venice is, we had heard that the "better" and more "authentic" Carinval was in Viareggio. Plus, it has been really cold and nasty in Venice recently and we weren't able to find any hotels or hostels considering we had kind of gotten lazy with planning. So we just decided we'd take the 2 hour train to Viareggio. I researched a little online and in my guidebook beforehand and found nothing but positive things about the town, so I figured it'd be a fun trip.

We left Siena with clear, blue skies. This day definitely had potential...the first beautiful day in about a week. We arrive in Viareggio and it was pouring. I'm not sure where along the journey the weather took a turn for the worst, but it did. Keep in mind, all of the Carnivale events are outdoors and the town is along the beach. I was SO excited to be at a beach.

Well, Viareggio is definitely a beach town. Kind of like how Galveston, Texas is a beach town...definitely not a St. Barth's. Perhaps my expectations were a little high due to the fact that I had been enduring freezing cold conditions for the better part of my stay in Italy. Nonetheless, one of my friends put it best, saying, "Well, at least now we know that not ALL of Italy is beautiful and how fortunate we are to live in Siena." I agreed with her, saying, "All I know is that I'm going online immediately after we get home and making some MAJOR edits on Wikipedia's article about Viareggio."

I had decided to leave my umbrella at home because I thought it was almost impossible for there to be any chance of rain when I was leaving Siena without there being a cloud in the sky. But because I was wrong, I was forced to buy an umbrella right as I exited the train station. I knew that this day wasn't going to go as I had originally expected when the man selling umbrellas sold me mine for 10 euro (it was a REALLY nice umbrella and a REALLY necessary purchase), but then turned around and sold the same kind of umbrella to my friend for 5 euro right in front of my face. I started arguing with the guy, but he didn't appreciate it too much and started yelling at me, so I cut my losses and gave up.

Anyway, we start walking towards the beach expecting to see lots of craziness...huge floats, people wearing masks, drinks everywhere, and really good food. Instead, we saw this:

empty bleachers.

After a couple of minutes wondering why the hell the place was a ghost town, we started asking some locals, who laughed at us and informed us that the Carnivale celebrations were only on Sundays. It turns out that we had come on the wrong day. We laughed at ourselves for a good 30 minutes and once again, decided to cut our losses and eat lunch. And by "eat lunch", I mean "drink lunch."

After consuming about 4 bottles of wine (averaging a bottle per person), we went to the gorgeous beach. It definitely wasn't a tanning day. It was more like this:

the stunning beach at Viareggio

After we ran around the beach for a bit, we walked along the strand. This was the strangest part of out time here. We noticed that the town obviously wasn't too wealthy, yet all of the stores along the strand were ridiculously high-end. And no one was in any of them. Like I said, this place was a legitimate ghost town and it was almost eery being there.

All of the walking had made us really thirsty, so we found another place to get cocktails. We stumbled out of that place and went in search of a place where we could get our faces painted. But of course, since Carnivale is only on Sundays, everyone kept saying, "DOMANDI!!!!" like we were idiots who had ended up at Carnivale on the wrong day or something...how strange!

So then we went back to Siena, got back at like 9:30, and somehow managed to go out til prettty late. Now I'm just waking up and I have SO much work to do :(