Coming out of the Florence train station was an experience unlike any other we have had on our trip so far. Most of the time, the train station isn’t in the nicest part of town. We saw that in Rome and Naples; we had to get away from the train station before we got to the “nicer” parts of the city.
But Florence was different. We came out of the train station to a nice little piazza with some grassy areas. There was some traffic, but not as much as we have seen in other cities. Instead of a plethora of buses and taxis we saw only a handful of each with a large number of bicycles.
Florence is the least motorized of the three cities we have been to so far. The main part of the city center, near the Duomo is pretty much vehicle free. The buses do not travel within the main city center, and there really are no cars to be seen. It is mainly people walking and riding bikes.
Our hotel is about 20 yards from the main piazza. We really lucked into this hotel with about as prime a location as you can get. The posted room rate on the back of the door of our hotel room is 300 Euros per night. I will tell you that we didn’t even spend that much for the room for our two-night stay.
After we checked in, we decided to go exploring. We dumped our bags and took just a couple of cameras with us as we walked around the city center. We went past the Duomo and down to the Palazzo Vecchio (where the original statue of David once stood, and where now there stands a duplicate). We then walked over the Ponte Vecchio (a bridge that crosses the Arno river that is lined with jewelry shops) and made it across without Jessica making any purchases.
We caught a bus on the other side of the Ponte Vecchio and rode to the Piazzale Michaelangelo. This piazza is high up on a hill and overlooks the entire city. We got up there right as the sun was setting and it made for a picturesque view of the city. We snapped lots of photos and stayed at the piazza until the sun completely set. We then haggled a man down from 55 Euros to 17 Euros for a perfectly real and new Burberry purse for Jessica. I’m sure that it is as real as Jessica’s Fendi sunglasses.
We walked back down from the piazzale and stopped for some pre-dinner drinks at a little sidewalk café. We each had an Italian draught beer and I also had a Campari and soda (a famous Italian pre-dinner drink that is supposed to prepare you for dinner). The beers were very good, and tasted a little like a Blue Moon (but they didn’t have an orange because Jody wasn’t there to invent the idea), but the Campari and soda was not all that great. I think I will just stick to beer and wine.
We then walked a little further into the city and came to a restaurant called
Il Gatto e la Volpe (The Cat and the Wolf), a local eatery for college students. We had a half-liter of house white wine and an order of bruschette to start.
We couldn’t really decide what to get, so we decided to order three different pastas and just share all three. We had ravioli with ricotta and spinach Bolognese, risotto ai quattro formaggi and spaghetti “gatto e la volpe.”
The pastas were incredible. We ate every bit of all three of them. I think that the house spaghetti was my favorite. It had a meaty sauce that had a little bit of a kick to it. Of course the others were good as well as we basically licked the plate clean.
We came back to the hotel to grab the laptop to go in search of some internet. Our hotel does not have internet access, so we are going to be a little out of touch for the next two days. We will try to find a café somewhere that has internet access so that we can post our blog entries and keep in touch with everyone.
Tomorrow we are going to catch an early train to Pisa to see the leaning statue (and take the requisite photos of us pretending to hold it up) in the morning before we visit two museums in the afternoon.
We already love Florence and will get to see more of it tomorrow. Ciao!
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