As you may have read on Facebook, I went to Florence this past weekend and had the time of my life! It was my favorite part of my stay in Italy thus far, one of the best weekends of my life, and I can now officially say that Florence is my new favorite city in the world. There is just so much to see and do there, a lot more than in the city center of Siena where I live, and it’s just so pretty and historical. In short, the highlights of my weekend in Florence were getting to spend it with my friend Courtney from back home, who is studying in Florence this summer; getting a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the entire city from the Piazzale Michelangelo; getting to visit the Basilica di Santa Croce and view the tombs of Michelangelo, Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli and Marconi, just to name a few; and finally, seeing my two favorite guidos, Pauly D and Vinny of Jersey Shore, in the flesh just a few feet away from me!
After a couple of very late nights, Maria and I met up with Alvaro, Matteo and Toni at the Siena bus stop to catch our 11:40 bus to Florence on Saturday morning. We finally arrived at around 1:00 in the afternoon, and we were able to see the Duomo, one of the most famous cathedrals in the world, from where the bus dropped us off. Since we were tourists and the Duomo was the biggest, tallest, and shiniest thing we saw, we migrated straight to it. When we got to the Piazza del Duomo I called my friend Courtney to see where she was and where she wanted to meet up. She lived only about a ten-minute walk from the Duomo so she decided to meet me there. A short while later I saw her walking in my direction, and after we hugged for about a minute, she told me that she had just recently started feeling homesick and was so happy to see a familiar face from home. She was also saying that she hadn’t done a whole lot of the touristy things yet, like take in a view of the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo or even try Italian gelato, so I think she was happy to have visitors with whom to show and explore the city.
After finding Courtney and taking a couple of pictures with the Duomo as the backdrop, our next order of business (well, my next order of business) was tracking down Pizzeria O’Vesuvio, where I knew the cast of Jersey Shore, was working for the summer. I guided everybody to the street it was on using Courtney’s map (of course I knew the name of the street even before coming to Florence), and found it about four blocks away from where we were at the Duomo. I was hoping once I tracked it down I would be able to get a pizza margherita made especially for me by Vinny Guadagnino himself, but none of the cast members were there when we got there. Some of the other touristy fans like myself told me that some of them had just left. One of the other tourists outside the pizzeria, a middle-aged man with a thick New Jersey accent, cracked us all up when he said he was looking for “Spooky” (Snooki) and was disappointed that he wasn’t getting to see her here :) But since I was starving, I did end up splitting a pizza margherita with Matteo, even if Vinny didn’t make it for me. We asked one of their coworkers about the cast and when they would be in, and she said she didn’t think they were working until Monday. I spent about ten minutes inside the restaurant, though, so when I see it on TV in August, it will be familiar territory to me! As will many other locales in the city. And don’t you worry, I ended up seeing my two favorite Jersey guidos the next day... :)
After I polished off that delicious O’Vesuvio pizza, the six of us decided to just poke around the city and see all that we could see. We passed an H&M, and the guys were the ones who asked the rest of us if we could go in. It was a four-story H&M, so we caved. After our shopping pit stop we were all in the mood for gelato, and we stumbled upon a place that served not only gelato in cups and cones, but these sandwich-type things with gelato on the inside and two sugar-coated waffles on the outside. Mmmm… After our heart attack on a plate, we decided to walk it off and make the trek uphill to the Pizzale Michelangelo. On our way over to that part of town we passed over the Ponte Vecchio and took some awesome pictures. We did the same when we got to the top of the Piazzale; the view was absolutely spectacular! There was also a replica of Michelangelo’s David in the piazzale (the original is also in Florence) as well as many souvenir shops; I got a couple of magnets and an umbrella with pictures of several Italian cities on it, since I had forgotten to bring an umbrella to Italy with me and it’s already rained a couple of times since I’ve been here. The umbrella actually came in handy on Sunday when it started raining; some locals looked at me like I was the tackiest tourist in the world, but I didn’t mind one bit. Another lady was carrying the same umbrella as me!
Later that night, we grabbed a late bite to eat at Florence’s Osteria Il Gatto e La Volpe, stayed there for a while, and then went to check out a nightclub called Twice. Courtney’s host family was nice enough to let me stay the night at their place, so I didn’t have to pay for a hotel or hostel :) After we ate breakfast the next morning, I pulled out my obligatory student travel guide for Italy to see if there was anything else in particular I wanted to see in Florence before I went back to Siena. I decided I wanted to go see the Basilica di Santa Croce after reading that it contained the tombs of Michelangelo, Dante, Galileo, Machiavelli and Marconi, as well as some awesome artwork in the Museo di Santa Croce that borders it. Courtney hadn’t been there yet either, and since she was in Florence studying art history, she was keen on going as well.
My guidebook told me it was one of the more expensive places to visit in town, but it only ended up being five euros total to get into both the basilica and the museum. This place was absolutely beautiful, and it wasn’t just the tombs that were amazing to see, but all the artwork. They even had Cimabue’s Crucifix, which was constructed in the year 1280 and was the one piece of artwork in the museum that endured the most damage during the flood that swept through Florence in 1966. They were able to restore it as much as possible, but all the mud, oil and water ruined it quite a bit. They didn’t paint over where all the muck wiped the paint away (of course, because then it wouldn’t have been Cimabue’s work), so it literally looks like somebody took a big eraser and just erased half of the paint that was there. At one point I was actually in the room alone with the crucifix, which was amazing; I just stood there staring at it for about five minutes. It is 731 years old! Americans really have no idea what history is compared to Europeans; I learned that very quickly. Visiting the Santa Croce basilica and museum was like a pilgrimage for Courtney and I; she is studying art history, I am studying Italian language and culture, and we are both Catholic. It was amazing in so many ways!
After our visit to Santa Croce, Courtney and I were both starving. Since I had had pizza for at least one meal a day almost every day that I’ve been in Italy, and since that’s about all I can get in Siena, I was craving something else, anything else. We decided to go to a Mexican grill called Tijuana that we had walked by the night before, and oh my gosh, what a delicious change of pace that was! My chicken and cheese quesadillas were sooooo good! After lunch I wanted to head over to the bus and train stations so I could check the schedules and buy a ticket back to Siena for sometime later that day. As we were walking I remembered for the first time since I left Pizzeria O’Vesuvio the day before that the Jersey Shore cast was in town at that same moment, and I was actually almost surprised that I hadn’t seen them, or a gaggle of cameramen and fans, anywhere in Florence the past two days.
We had to pass by the Duomo and its surrounding cafés and shops on the way to the bus station, and as we were passing through we noticed a small crowd gathered outside of a restaurant and bar called Astor, which is, as Courtney had told me earlier, one of the places that is frequently visited by the Jersey Shore cast. We looked closer and noticed that there were a couple of cameras in between the spectators and the patio… clearly, a camera crew and a crowd of people gathered outside Astor could only mean one thing! I made my way through the group of people (I can’t even really call it a crowd, there were only about 20 of us, max) and I almost died when I saw that it was Vinny and Pauly D! I was so happy it was them, because if I could have handpicked two Shore cast members (or any two celebrities, for that matter) that I would have wanted to see, I would have picked them! They’re just so mmmm... :) It was almost hard to believe it was actually them at first, because they were the exact same distance away from me at the restaurant in Florence as they are whenever I watch them on TV :) The only difference was that this time, they were actually looking back at me!
That's them at the table behind me!
I almost kind of felt bad for them, though (they are my paesani, after all), since they literally can’t go anywhere, even out of the country, without people staring at them and snapping their picture. I actually caught Pauly’s eye as I was holding my camera and realized he must have felt like a caged animal at the zoo. But I didn’t feel bad enough to put my camera away completely; after all, they did sign up for it! Anyways, Pauly is just as handsome in person as he is on TV, and Vinny is even more so! He has more of a five o’clock shadow now, perhaps to blend in better here in Italia. While we were standing there ogling like oglers on ogle tablets, several local people and other Italians saw the commotion and stopped by and asked who they were, so I explained it to them. One lady told one of the security guards that she thought he was cuter than Vinny and Pauly, so she asked to get a picture with him. What a silly person :P
And so ends my amazing weekend in Florence. I really want to go back! I walked around the city so much this weekend and saw so much that I was certain I walked down every single street at least twice, but I know there is still so much to see! Next time I come to Italy I will for sure be spending a great deal of time in Firenze. But in two weekends we are going to Roma, and then the weekend after that I head down to Sicilia! Oh yeah, and my studies, you know, that thing I actually came here to do… they’re going great! I am learning new things every day, and each time I walk through the streets of Siena and hear the bits of conversations that go by, I understand more and more :)
I'll try to put more pictures on here later, it only let me add the one just now. But I'm putting about a hundred pictures from Florence on Facebook, so check there too!
Chloe
I'll try to put more pictures on here later, it only let me add the one just now. But I'm putting about a hundred pictures from Florence on Facebook, so check there too!
Chloe
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