Firenze

Part 2 of our Italy trip was in the beautiful city of Florence! We only had about 24 hours in the city, so we tried to make the best of it! When we first arrived at the train station on Friday night, we walked the short distance to our hostel. It was called Leonardo house and was very nice! We had a room to ourselves. We set out to find some gelato and explored a little bit. We found the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. I think it was the biggest church I'd ever seen! It had beautiful colors and seemed to stretch on forever! We got lost for a little bit and eventually found our hostel.

The next morning we got up and walked by the Basilica of Santa Maria again and continued on to Piazza della Signoria, a beautiful square with several statues and fountains. There's a copy of the famous statue of David made by Michelangelo there (the original had to be moved to a museum, but the copy is in the same place and is completely identical). We then walked to Santa Croce, the church where several famous people are buried, including Michelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli. We had a bit of a bad experience there. Joanna and I were wearing very cute dresses and they singled us out and made us pay extra for robes to cover our shoulders (they weren't even spaghetti strap dresses!). We thought it was fine until we got inside and saw several other people wearing the same outfits. They clearly singled us out and were not nice about it. But we soon moved on to cross the river and climbed to the top of a hill to have a beautiful view of Florence. It really was so cool!! Then we walked to Pitti Palace and had lunch and gelato. We crossed Ponte Vecchio, the famous bridge with shops on it, and made our way back to Piazza della Signoria (with a brief stop in a Disney store!). We toured through Palazzo Vecchio, a really beautiful palace! After leaving the palace, we relaxed in the sunny square for a bit. It was such a nice sunny day! We eventually made our way back to the hostel and picked up our stuff to go to Rome! It felt like we could have spent several more days in Florence, but we got a nice taste of the city and I'm glad we were able to see it!

Next stop: ROMA! (To be continued...)