Day 9: Florence

Walking in Florence.

Wednesday, we returned to Florence, almost a year to the day since we had been there with our friends Suzy and Dan. We scarfed down another quick breakfast at the convent and caught our train. We didn't have cheap business-class seats on this one, so there was no free snack and it was a lot more crowded. We passed through the northern part of the Apennine Mountains and (unlike the train to Naples) went through a lot of long tunnels.

We got to Florence around 10 without much of a plan, and that was fine by us. After eight days of visiting museums and ancient sites, thinking about how to plan a study-abroad trip to Rome, Florence was our relaxing treat to ourselves. There's very little ancient in Florence and so we wouldn't take students there as part of our trip. It was nice to have a day "off the clock," as it were.

Il Papiro.

The River Arno from the Ponte Vecchio.

Much of our time in Florence was spent shopping, both window and real. We went into a lot of candy and chocolate stores, including Venchi, one of Lisa's favorites. We stopped in several leather stores (something Florence and Tuscany is known for), looking for boots for Lisa, which we didn't find, and a leather satchel type bag for me, which we eventually did find after lots of looking and thinking. (I have to state here that yes, it's sort of a man-purse, but quite frankly, I think it's a useful bag to carry while traveling in Europe, as I found both last year and on this trip. Every day, I carried around a water bottle, a small travel umbrella, two or three guidebooks, a map, a notebook to record sites and museum artifacts useful for the class, and sometimes even snack food. Before Florence, I had been using a little canvas messenger bag of Lisa's and I was looking for a classier upgrade to use. I'm sure this bag will be handy next year, too, since I'll be carrying all the stuff I listed above, plus lecture notes, as we lead students on walking tours every day.) In one leather store, the saleswoman talked to us mostly in Italian, which we understood, and Lisa tried to answer in Italian, but I think it sounded like a lot of Latin. Regardless, the saleswoman knew what Lisa meant!

Gold store on the Ponte Vecchio.

We also looked into the windows of all the gold and jewelry stores lining the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge over the Arno River. It's amazing how detailed and various the objects on sale were. We stopped at Il Papiro, too, a nice paper store that sells marbled paper handmade in Florence.

Ribollita.

Gelato at Grom.

In addition to the shopping, we also enjoyed the food. One of the main reasons we returned to Florence was because Lisa liked where we ate last year. For lunch, we returned to the Tratoria Marino where we had eaten dinner with Suzy and Dan and where they served the delicious ribolitta soup. The same two waiters were working there and the ribolitta was a little different than we remembered, but still tasty, especially on a cool but sunny spring day. As a mid-afternoon snack, we got a sandwich from Ivo, the wonderful panino place Dan had found for our lunch last year. We also got gelato twice, once at Grom (one of the best places in Florence) and once at Venchi on our way returning to the train station.

Palazzo Vecchio.

The only sight-seeing we did was to return to the Duomo to take some pictures inside. Otherwise, it was almost an entire day of nothing but leisurely strolling, shopping, and eating. It was a very relaxing day and a nice last full day in Italy. As our colleague in the Italian program told me before we came, Florence just seems like such a relaxed, slower-paced place after the chaos of Rome.

The Duomo of Florence.

Interior of the Duomo.

The Victor Emmanuel Monument (with construction in the foreground!).

Our train back to Rome got in a little after six and we returned to the convent to settle our bill. From there, we headed back over to Trastevere for our last dinner and chose a restaurant right next door to where we had eaten the night before. The food was good, but there was only one waiter working and, although not a terribly large place, it was pretty full. That meant the service was painfully slow and we saw numerous people leave before getting their menus because they were tired of waiting. That also meant we didn't finish till quite late. To get back to the hotel, we took the first bus we saw heading to the city center and changed at the Piazza Venezia. It was a long-about route, but we didn't want to wait for the direct bus. Plus, the second bus took us past the Victor Emmanuel Monument, the Imperial Fora, the Colosseum, the Palatine, and the Circus Maximus, all of them light up. It was a nice tour of the major sites of Rome on our last night in the city.

Coming next: the trip home.