Weekend in Florence

This weekend I went to Florence and it was great! It was a lot different than I expected, but fun nonetheless. We left Rome early in the morning to catch a bus to the train station and then a train to Florence. The trains had little rooms in them with seats facing each other, just like in Harry Potter! We arrived in Florence in the afternoon and checked into our hostel. I was a little creeped out by the hostel situation at first, but it turned out to be ok. We arrived at a building and found the name of the Hostel Veronique on a doorbell. We rang it and a lady told us to come in and go up to the top floor. We got in the building and started going up the stairs in complete darkness—we couldn’t find the lights anywhere. Once we made it to the second floor, a lady came into the hallway to turn the lights on for us and led us to the fourth floor. We entered a room where a man took our money (and put it into his own wallet!) and showed us our room. It was pretty cute, but we were all worried that we were going to get scabies from the blankets!


Our hostel room

After putting our stuff away we headed out into Florence. The first thing we did was climb Brunelleschi’s Duomo, the dome that he designed before building the one at St. Peters. 463 steps later, we were at the top of the dome looking out at the beautiful view of Florence below. The weather was perfect—blue skies and sun, which made the pictures great and standing outside bearable. After taking numerous pictures, we headed back down to look at the church that it was attached to, which was a beautiful gothic style church with vaulted ceilings and arches everywhere.


The outside of the Duomo


The beautiful view!


Another...


Me at the top!


After the Duomo we headed through the leather markets to take a look at the merchandise, looked at a few churches that we studied in school a few years ago, and went to see the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge with houses built into the sides. It is seriously the coolest/cutest bridge I have ever seen. The houses have been converted into really expensive jewelry shops with the prettiest jewelry ever! After wandering around we went to dinner at MamMaMia! I had the best gnocchi with cheese sauce that I’ve ever had and the waitress even gave us free champagne with dinner! After dinner we went to a little gelato shop and got ripped off by some crabby ladies (8 euro for a gelato when she told us that it was only 3.75!!!) Then we hung out at a pub for a while before heading to bed.

Ponte Vecchio


Ponte Vecchio again!


Sunday was freezing cold! We woke up early to get the most out of Florence before we had to leave, but most places didn’t even open until noon! (Leah, you should move to Florence! Haha) We shopped a lot and climbed a hill to the top of Florence where the Boboli gardens are. We spent a lot of time in and out of stores just so that we could warm up! Then we headed back to the train station to catch a 6:00 train back to Rome. It’s really weird how good it felt to come back to Rome… I am already starting to feel comfortable here!


Look at how steep the hill was that we climbed!