Coffee, Tea, Tiramisu, and Heaven

First of all, check out this link. This is where I'll be staying this weekend when I go to Florence!  AH-MAY-ZING!  So now that that is out of the way, I'll talk a bit about what we did today.  
It was an absolutely beautiful day today, which is great because it's been freezing (well, not actually but colder than I was hoping for.)   I meandered around for a while before class and found this amazing view outside the walls of Siena.

A little research on Siena finds that it's one of the oldest cities in Europe.  Not really important or populated until about 400 AD, Siena has had a checkered past of struggles of power between nobility and Christian leadership.  Multiple walls have been built around the city, the main entrance of which, looks like this:

There are so many fountains and churches in this town.  A few of the fountains look like this:

In our cooking lesson we made a pate (which was a lot better than expected for chicken liver), Gnocchi with a gorgonzola sauce, a turkey roll, and tiramisu).  So, liver and moldy cheese, not nearly as bad as imagined (actually quite enjoyable).  Tiramisu was amazing (three servings!).  And, as always, a few lessons about coffee and tea condensed from 12 pages of notes:

•  Coffee has been associated with accelerated loss of calcium from bones.
• Theoretically, green or black tea could be made from the same leaves.
• Poor quality coffee (robusta) should be darker roast to mask the poor aromas and natural flavors with those created in the roasting, while high quality coffee (arabica) should be a more mild roast to allow the natural aromas to dominate.
• Decaf was invented in 1908 in Germany
• You can't make iced tea with regular tea otherwise it becomes cloudy because the caffeine and another molecule in the tea bind and become a solid. 

Cheers to the daily adventure.