I am very excited to be staying in Florence for a little while. There is so much to do both here and in the area. I probably won’t see all the sights in the city, just because they are all so expensive, but that in no way limits my options.
I arrived here at a little after noon yesterday. When I first got to my hostel I thought I might be in the wrong place. It was set up like a nice hotel in the front. But I was correct. While it is definitely still a hostel, it has many perks that I never would have thought a hostel would carry. A pool, sauna, and exercise room are tucked into the basement, near the restaurant within the hostel. It is really rather clean too, and the restaurant isn’t too bad, and is cheap. Still, I think I would rather go out in the town more than eat in.
After becoming acquainted with my hostel, I decided to go wander around a little bit. Maybe buy a new umbrella since there is much rain in my next week’s forecast, and the one I bought in Paris is officially dead. So as I wandered I stumbled onto one of the awesome leather markets, and we all know I’m a sucker for good leather. I have to keep telling myself I don’t need another jacket, though I am highly tempted to get one, and I honestly don’t know that I will make it out of here without one. Or at least something leather. Just the smell when you wander through those areas is amazing.
After the market, I got turned around somehow, and was facing the wrong direction. Turns out this was meant to be though. As I’m strolling down the street I thought I heard my name, but figured I was imagining it. After hearing it called out several times though I turned around and there are Jillian and Andrew on the street corner. I couldn’t believe I met people on a street corner in Florence, especially since I thought they were in Venice. After laughing at the fact that we had not only run into each other, but also the fact that the recognized me by my bright purple hoodie, which sticks out like a beacon among all the blacks and grays they wear here, they headed off to see the David, and I headed back towards my hostel. Or so I thought. Six blocks later I had wandered through the north end of Florence and had to turn around and take the street I had thought I was on. Oops.
Once back at the hostel I went to dinner with Jake, from Missoula, MT. We had fun getting different dishes so that we could try a wider variety of food offered, drinking wine, and discussing the best skiing locations in the Pacific Northwest. He’s heading back there in two weeks, so he was happy to hear about all the snow, and is prepared for an awesome ski season. Somehow he also managed to talk me into going to the sauna, which turned out to be an awesome end to the day. I had forgotten how much I enjoy those.
This morning I decided I was going to head to Orvieto, since Thursday is one of their market days. Unfortunately I arrived too late in the day for the market, but I still enjoyed seeing my favorite haunts from before. The giant boar on its wheeled cart was still there too! After wandering though several amazing stories for quills, journals, leather, and ceramics (sadly my silver store is now gone) and admiring the view from all four sides of the plateau, the wind got a bit chilly and drove me indoors. I went to a little Café underneath the clock tower and had bruschetta con pomadoro and café latte. It was wonderful! I finished off the meal with gelato from my favorite gelataria, getting tiramisu and bacia (which was recommended by the delivery man who came in, and was excited to show off the little bit of English he had learned recently).
After this I wandered back to the funiculare, but had an hour to kill before my train. What I want to know is how we spent all that time there and loving the place, and never realized we had never seen the back half of the city. The fortress is free to walk in and I had fun climbing up the old walls and seeing the view from a whole new vantage point. A local who was walking through and is interested in architecture gave me the history of the fortress too; from the Etruscans to the Medieval era. You can tell the different eras from the colors of the stones they used when building. I even went to check out St. Patrick’s Well, though I still didn’t go down it. It just made the city even better than I had remembered it to be.
I am currently on the train back to Florence, which will pretty much finish off my day. It’s a 2.5 hour ride each direction. Still, it was absolutely worth it, and I can’t tell you how happy to know that not only did I get to see my favorite city, but that memory hadn’t exaggerated its amazingness; that it really was that wonderful. I liked too that on the train ride in, I could tell when I was getting close by the other hills and towns nearby. I’m glad that Umbria stuck with me so well after all these years, and that it will likely stay with me again until once more I can make it back to this fantastic region.
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