28 Hours in Florence

I’m writing in the Dublin Airport on Monday afternoon, about halfway through my four-hour layover here between Milan and New York.  Hopefully I’ll get to post this soon.

As I wrote before, my whirlwind week was perfect. It began with the aforementioned road tripping around Sicily.  Then I was back with my last host family from last year near Milan for a few relaxing, adventurous days. 

  

On Thursday morning, I took the speedy train (which was disappointingly not so speedy) to Florence to meet a tutor friend from last year, Simone.  Luckily, she has a friend who has an apartment in the center of the city, and some of her roommates just moved out, so I had a room to myself. 

My goals for Florence were set:

1. See Simone 
2. Go to the Bargello, a statue museum I missed out on last year because Lonely Planet told me it closed at 1:50 every day (lie). 
3. Go to the piazza across the river with a great view of the city and the bronze (maybe copper?) David statue. 
4. Have really good gelato and possibly aperitivo

… and I did them all! The Bargello was fun, and it worked out well because that afternoon there were torrential downpours, which let up whenever we had to go outside.  We made it to the piazza on Friday morning, which was a much nicer day, and had perfect light/visibility for good picture-taking.

I re-visited Gelateria Dei Neri, one of the best if not the best gelateria I went to last year, and Simone’s friend took us to another gelateria across the river that I’d heard about, which was just as good if not better. 

On Thursday night we went for aperitivo, which I posted a picture of in my last post.  Pretty much, you go to a bar between 7-9 and pay for one drink, usually 7 or 8 euro.  With that drink comes access to an unlimited buffet of appetizers.  Sometimes there are only a few choices, but the place we went to had 20ish choices, including pastas, rice dishes, meat, veggie things, it was wonderful.  So I had three overflowing plates of a mix of delicious food, and a strawberry daiquiri, for 8 euro.

In Florence (and also in Milan), I realized that I should really wait more than a year before re-visiting these incredible places, unless I have specific people to visit.  Last year, the Milan Duomo absolutely blew me away, and this year, when I popped out of the metro and saw it, I thought, “I remember it being bigger.”  When strolling past the Florence Duomo on my way to Simone’s friend’s apartment, I really missed the “WOW!” factor I remember experiencing last year.  I’m still glad I went to these places because of the people I got to see there, but I’m wondering how long it will take for the shock value to regenerate.