Day 17 – Thursday August 26th

Today was our travel day to Florence. We had a 9:27 train from Venezia to Frienze Stazione di Santa Maria Novella. We found a new way to get from our hotel to the train station, which involved only 2 bridges so we were happy girls. The train ride was about 2 hours and we grabbed a taxi in Florence to our hotel. Our hotel is cute and quait. It’s apartment style living, with adorable rooms, which are way nicer than I expected.They have cute painted vintage looking art on the walls and quaint furniture. The walkway from the main door on the street is adorable, full of plants and a little chair and tale set-up.
Camilla, our landlord, gave us some great dining and sightseeing tips and then we headed out. We walked about a block South of our hotel to Piazza del Mercato Centrale to grab some lunch. We ate at Pepó – a cute little trattoria with mintish green walls and pigs stamps, blackboards and chalk. Allyson and I splite the wild boar taglioline and I had Tomato soup known as Pappo de pomodore.
After lunch we headed farther South and saw the Piazza del Duomo, or the giant brick dome with 8 white ribs that towers over the city.
The Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore is a beautiful green, pink, and white, church made from marble. East of the Cattedrale is Piaza San Giovanni where the Baptistery stands – they used to baptize all of Florence back in the day. The doors are bronze by Lorenzo Ghiberti called the gates of paradise.After checking that out we headed back north just east of our hotel to Galleria dell’Accademia. We spent over 2 hours in academia looking at David and other renaissance art. It was interesting that they layout was mediocre. Denise, Andrea, Allyson and I talked about how Italy differs from America, and even France, with a pride in their art and history, and a drive to excel. Allyson analogized Italy to a rich kid living off their trust fund and now that trust fund is running out but its all they have. They seem to lack the understanding that tourism is a huge part of their survival and they don’t yet know how exactly to capitalize to the fullest with it. Like we were talking about how Italy's reputation far exceeds the reality that the people live in. It seems they are completely segregated, based on influence in the world and even language, from the rest of the modern world. They hold a lot of pride in their history yet can’t seem to keep it up. We’ve had interesting experiences thus far with the people and it’s given me a different perspective on Italy and Italian people.

After Accademia we headed back to the Duomo and had Aperitivos – Rossinis (Strawberry bellini’s) – and then walked back up to Mercato Centrale and ate and La Mamma de Frienze. Allyson and I shared fried lamb chops and rosemary potatoes, and we had Kir Royales, which were deliscious. Denise and Andrea shared a greek salad and beef tenderloin. It was a delicious dinner, but yet again, the bread was bland, chalky and sadly, is an Italian concept I neither like nor appreciate (I learned that it was rude to sop up the leftover juices off of my plate, but in Italy they purposely do not salt their breads so that it will be a blank canvas in which to house the other flavors).