We arrived in Milan early Sunday morning. It felt like the middle of the night for us coming from Boston's time zone. When we arrived the gate was unlisted for our connecting flight to Florence, but we were soon told it was cancelled due to an Italy-wide power outage.

Frustrated and tired, we followed the instructions to pick up our luggage. An official told us that Alitalia, our airline, had arranged a bus to take us to Florence. It would take nearly four hours, almost as long as a drive to Siena (an hour further south than Florence).

Fortunately, our cell phones work in Europe, and we were able to change our rental car pick-up to Milan's airport instead of Florence. We then began the long drive south to Florence on the autostrada (Italian for "highway").

The little rental car that could

Our little Nissan Micra had some trouble with the hills as we got closer to Florence and Siena, and we had to be careful of fast German and Italian cars flying up behind us -- stretches of the autostrada have no speed limit. -- when we passed in the left lane. But it got us to Siena and eventually back up to Venice where we spent our last two days in Italy.