Memory, Final Week

It was a Saturday at the beginning of July, the one following my first week in Italy. While most of the students from other colleges went to Venice for the weekend, my little group from the University of West Georgia decided to take it easy our first weekend, to just day-trip somewhere, and save Venice for another weekend. Pienza, another Tuscan hill town a short way from Montepulciano where we were staying, sounded good. We slept late, rolled out of bed into our shorts and flip-flops, and ate at what we had already termed the Italian Zaxby's, a little pizza parlor we all loved and had already frequented at least three times that week for lunch between classes.
After lunch, we traipsed downhill to the bus station just outside of Montepulciano and, after buying our biglietti (tickets, one of the only Italian words I had learned thus far), boarded the bus to Pienza. The ride was uneventful; we probably chatted, maybe dozed, and, to be honest, our self-guided tour of Pienza was rather uneventful as well. We shopped; I bought one of my favorite pieces of jewelry, a delicate slave bracelet that consisted of a ring of Celtic knots around my finger connected to an ornate Celtic trinity symbol and my wrist by nothing more than a thin silver chain. We found a quaint park where Amanda fell asleep sprawled on a park bench, Nick fell asleep reading a book of poetry, and Rachel fell asleep behind her sunglasses so that I didn't know she had fallen asleep and sat talking to her for a few minutes before inadvertently waking her.
I believe we grabbed an afternoon snack of gelato and headed back to the bus stop. The sky had been fairly clear all day, only a few puffy clouds, faintly tinted gray, hinted at rain, but as we stood under the flimsy plastic bus shelter, it began to come down in sheets. Shortly after it started, over our laughter and conversation about barely fitting under the awning, we began to hear loud raps above our head. Looking up and around us we realized that nickle-sized hail was bouncing across the pavement, skittering around our feet. We all got out our cameras for the first time that day and took pictures at arms length of our four faces squashed together sporting mock scared expressions while the hail fell in the background.
Looking back on the incident now, it amazes me that I don't remember more about Pienza, the tourist town we set out to explore. Instead, I remember us falling asleep in a park, a piece of Celtic jewelry I bought in Italy, and how we huddled in a bus shelter to avoid the hail. We went back to Montepulciano, visited Manuel at his little cafe, A Gambe di Gatto, for a pre-dinner drink, and ate more pizza and drank wine at the restaurant where our study-abroad group ate every night. I also remember that we never made it to Venice.