Manchester to Florence

An uneventful journey from Manchester to Paris. We arrived at Gare du Nord slightly early at about 5.20 in the afternoon, giving me almost an hour and a half to reach the Gare de Bercy for the night train to Florence.
Paris in rush hour is pretty busy and the platforms on the RER cross-Paris trains were packed. Then I noticed that the trains on the line I wanted (RER D) weren't running, so I had to take a different route using RER B and Metro line 14. But I arrived at the station in plenty of time, and joined the crowds waiting for the train to start loading. Which it eventually did, so everyone piled on and I found my compartment right at the front of the train.
I was the last one to join my compartment, a four-berth couchette. The others were all French, also all travelling to Florence. One married couple and a slightly creepy single man who barely spoke the whole journey. I did get to practice my French a bit, hoping it wouldn't interfere too much with my Italian for the next few days.
We left Paris about 20 minutes late and travelled out along the rivers Seine and Yonne, with our first stop at Dijon. Shortly afterwards, I went to bed.
Sleeping on overnight trains is never that restful, and I woke up several times in the night. But at around 7am I got up and realised we were a bit late. The train was due into Florence at 7.15, but we were still way north of there. In fact, we were approaching Modena (where I will be changing trains for Mantua on my way home). No explanation from the attendants as to what had happened. We missed out the planned stop at Bologna (passengers for there having to change at Modena). I remember from an Italian class a chapter 'Bologna – tutti i treni si portano a Bologna' (all trains lead to Bologna – like the Crewe of northern Italy but with better food and prettier Renaissance buildings), but in this case our train didn't. And so we trundled on through the Apennines. You don't get to see much as a lot of the journey between Bologna and Florence is in tunnels, but it looks beautiful, with Swiss-style chalets and high green hills.