Florence

After a long day in Tuscany, Bria and I continued the theme and got up early on Saturday morning to try to make the most of our last day in Italy and our first day truly in Florence.

Grabbing our breakfast at the hostel (an odd buffet including tomato pasta and tiramisu for the first meal of the day), we headed out for our first glimpses of the city.





Very different from Rome, Florence definitely has a more old-world feel that feels much more like the iconic Italian countryside town, while still offering enough excitement to be a thriving city.






Our first stop of the day was at the Academy museum, home of the famous David statue. We bought tickets online for the second available time at 8:30am, and walked right in to a pretty much empty museum, which was great. No photos of David allowed, but it was quite a sight to behold. The statue is much, much bigger than I had pictured (taking up a whole portion of a high-ceilinged hall) and unbelievably realistic. It was one of those rare pieces or artwork that I could definitely look at for a while without being tired of it.

We also saw plenty of Jesus paintings (for lack of better description), a hall of full of hauntingly-realistic sculptures, as well as Michelangelo's prisoners—a handful of statues not finished and still carved into massive blocks of stones.

Florence's Duomo

The food & wine market we came across

After the museum (which now had a line at least a couple of hours long, go us), we headed to Florence's famous duomo. As I had, at this point, seen about a million cathedrals, I lit a candle and found a bench to happily wait as Bria and Claire snapped pictures throughout.

From there, we meandered through town and came across a food market with the most amazing cheeses and meats, which I took the liberty to sample at great lengths. With a Italian pastry in hand, I continued along the Ponte Vecchio, the most famous bridge in the city. All of the colorful houses along the River made quite the beautiful backdrop to our morning in Florence.

This is what you get when Rachel gets up early 4 days in a row.

We wound our way through more shops and markets (one of my favorite past times), and Bria and I bought matching Pashmina scarves and we all picked up some Christmas presents for our families. By about noon we were pretty hungry and decided to head to a small family-owned restaurant that Bria had researched the night before.

This was a great idea—not only did I finally get to have some authentic Italian lasagne, but we had delicious bread and olive oil and wine, all served by the sons of a man who began the restaurant something like fifty years ago. What an authentic ending to our Italian adventure.

Apparently if you rub this boar's snout, you'll come back. See you soon, Florence!

After lunch, we started making our way back to the main part of the city when—alas!—a leather jacket called to me through the window of a leather boutique. Seriously, it was one of those magical moments where angels are singing and light magically breaks through the heavens. Even better? A sign on the rack read "special prices." Knowing it was still probably out of my price range, I decided to have a look anyways, because, hey that's what I do and I like that self-torture moment all of the over-zealous brides on Say Yes to the Dress enjoy when they try on $20,000 dresses they can't afford.

The boutique where I bought the jacket of my dreams!

Anyways, I wondered in, and it turned out the jacket, one of the last left from their summer collection, was on sale! While it was still pretty pricey, I had been toying around with the idea of splurging on something I could only buy in Europe, and Florence is THE leather capital of the world. Also considering I'll get VAT (tax) back when I leave the UK, it was quite the steal for a beautiful leather jacket hand-crafted in Tuscany.










The woman working at the store, who has run it with her husband for decades and has a lot of repeat customers, even used to work with someone who now lives in St. Paul, MN and showed me all of the Christmas cards and letters they send to each other each year. How cool is that?!

Because our Italian trip would not be complete for one last (and seventh) trip to a gelato shop, we picked some up on our way back to the hostel. Finishing up the last bit of our wine from the vineyard the day before, we headed to a bus to the Florentine airport. Low and behold, we ended up seeing an Australian couple that was on our tour—Sandra kept telling the man he should be on TV because he was good looking—and chatted with them in the long passport line on our arrival to Gatwick.

From there, we hopped back on the train to get into Victoria, successfully using 2 planes, 4 trains, and 3 buses in our travels to Italy. Fantastico!