Peroni

We arrived late into Firenze, Italy (That is Florence, but they call it Firenze over here) on Monday at about 9:35 and had the pleasure of walking for 30 minutes through the rain to get to our hostel. To our surprise, this hostel was phenomenal and made me not want to leave it for the night. So, I didn’t and fell asleep. I did not know what to expect from Florence and was just looking forward to relaxing. After the hustle and Bustle of Rome, Florence has been exactly what I needed.

First thing Tuesday morning we packed up or stuff and headed across town to another other hostel, which was more centrally located and equally as nice as the first nights hostel. We then hit up a Laundromat and did our laundry. I wanted to wear a clean shirt; it had been a couple of days. Okay, so finally we got down to business, pulled out the foldable map, threw on the kicks, and headed out to see the sights. On the map were numbers with stars on them; we decided to visit these numbers. Before we could visit fifteen churches, we had to go take a visit to see Michelangelo’s David. We paid our ten Euro and walked into the museum the held the famous sculpture. Well Done, Michelangelo. It was impressive and worth the ten Euro.

The day got exponentially better from there as we stumbled-upon a 1 Euro store. Everything in there was 1 Euro; including Coca-Cola light that varied in sizes and 66 Centiliter tall bottles of Peroni, my favorite Italian beer and the only one I am familiar with. I am learning the metric system. We were walking along the rustic streets of Florence with our clanging bottles of Peroni and were heading back to the hostel to put them on a fridge when we ran into a friend of Jonathan’s, Ashley, and two of her friends she is studying abroad with. They were heading over to the Piazza Michelangelo, which is situated just on the south side of the city and came with an unobstructed view of Florence. We hung out there, drank the Peroni, and watched the sunset. The night was a solid one and resulted in quite a few pictures of the sun dropping over the mountains that surround Florence and heading towards the Mediterranean.

Today, we took it pretty easy. The highlights included a great pizza for dinner and a visit to the Basilica di Santa Maria del flore, which is home to the largest brick dome ever constructed.

There has been a change in our itinerary worth noting. We are no longer heading to Innsbruck after Bolzano; we will now be heading to Interlaken, Switzerland. We have heard a lot of good things about Interlaken and nothing spectacular about Innsbruck. Should be a good time.

-Brendan