After the never-ending festaggiando Sunday-Tuesday, I took a much-needed break Wednesday night to try to let my poor body recover a bit. Along those same lines, Danny and I nixed the Barcelona idea for this weekend in favor of really DOING Florence - there are tons of things here that I've wanted to see and do but STILL haven't yet, and since Nicole's boyfriend was coming to town for the weekend and they were going to be doing all the traditional touristy-Florence stuff, and since pretty much everyone was still recovering from fall break and were thus staying in town as well, I thought I'd take advantage and do a little low-key sight-seeing. And maybe a little hard-core partying as well, who knows.
So come Thursday there was indeed some hard partying on the horizon - I ended up going dancing with some friends and somehow throughout the course of the night, my phone must have managed to jump out of my pocket and be trampled on by thousands of drunk people, or so I would assume, since when I went to pick up my purse from the coat-check and realized my phone wasn't in it, the coat guy asked me if it was "il telefonino tutto rotto," or "the totally broken one," to which I obviously replied "DEFINITELY not...", at which point he then presented to me my lovely little phone, pleasantly bent in half, with a gorgeous kaleidoscope of broken shards decorating what was once the screen. And of course, overly-dramatic me proceeded to silently take the phone, make a beeline for the door, and promptly scream at the top of my lungs once outside. Just one concise, forceful yell, and then I put the useless scrap of metal back in my purse, threw on my coat, and threaded my arm through Danny's. He looked down at me, gave me a kiss on the forehead and said "you are such a nut-job," and we proceeded to have the loveliest walk home. Classico.
The next day will most likely go down in history as the most perfect sight-seeing-in-Florence day EVER. Poor, phoneless me woke up and made a beeline to the WIND store, closed my eyes, held my breath, and dropped €90 on a shiny new tri-band Motorola. Shit happens, right? Once re-connected to the world (although completely without ANY numbers), I headed down to school to meet Danny at a designated meeting spot (so old-school; how did people LIVE before cell phones??) and we walked down to the Duomo to meet up with Nicole and her boyfriend Brad, hilariously running into at least 10 of our best friends along the way.
Once we met up, we commenced our tourist-site tackling; first stop, climbing to the top of the Duomo. I've got to say, its kind of embarassing that I had never ONCE been inside the most well-known landmark in all of Florence, the point from which we know how to get to all of the bars but the history of which I know little-to-nothing about. SO lame. But hey, better late than never, eh? And with architectural-genius Danny in tow, we basically had our own personal tour guide the whole way up. Fantastico.
After hundreds of teeny-tiny little stone stairs leading your through the walls and other indeterminable skeletal parts of the cathedral itself, you are suddenly spit out on this circular balcony that lines the entire interior dome, and are thus inches away from the massive frescos covering the entire thing. SO incredible. It's amazing how truly crappy frescos look up-close, and yet how powerful and nuanced they seem from afar.
After a few more claustrophobic flights of stairs, we are spit out once again, this time to a churning, black sky, threatening rain over an incomparable panorama of the entirety of Florence, Fiesole, and all surrounding countryside. It was simultaneously terrifying, breathtaking, and incredibly romantic. And OF COURSE it started to rain, which OF COURSE to me made the whole experience even cooler and more unique. SO awesome. After like 50 pictures of basically the same thing we finally made our way back down to Earth, changing our minds like 30 times about what to do next, and ultimately splitting up to do our own thing until meeting back up for a jaunt up to Fiesole for dinner.
Danny and I ended up checking out the Duomo's Baptistry, which I had no idea was completely decked out in gilded mosaics (if I have learned nothing else from my time here in Italy, it is that I am ceaselessly drawn to anything shiny, sparkly, or otherwise "pretty." What am I, a freakin’ raccoon?). Very cool. We were gonna try to swing by the Uffizi for a minute since he'd never been yet, but alas, the line was too long and we decided to check out the Palazzo Vecchio instead, Florence’s main government building, which was so overwhelmingly covered with crazy frescoes and gilding and random little rooms that it just made me tired. However, Danny did tell me a crazy-cool story about how when the Medici family took over the Palazzo Vecchio - Florence's freakin' town hall - as their private home (pretty ballsy, if I do say so myself), they asked the architect, Mr.-Renaissance-man Giorgio Vasari, to build them a secret passageway that ran all the way from the Palazzo Vecchio (and perhaps even from the Uffizi, which was originally built as an office building - hence the Italian word for offices, "gli uffizi" - to replace the no-longer-functional Palazzo Vecchio), across the river along the Ponte Vecchio, all the way to their "country estate," the Palazzo Pitti and Boboli Gardens, which, thanks to urban sprawl, are no longer so much in the country. The whole passageway is apparently lined with portraits, and you can still traverse it today, with a reservation and most likely a hefty fee, starting in the beautiful Uffizi and ending up in the even-more-beautiful Boboli Gardens. But alas, we'll save that for another day.
After sufficient Renaissance reminiscing, we stopped for a much-needed caffè on our way to meet back up with the lovebirds for part 2 of our Florentine adventure: sunset exploring and dinner in the neighboring hill town of Fiesole. We hopped on the good ol' number 7 bus at Piazza San Marco and watched my house go by as we took it all the way to the end of the line, up through the hills to Fiesole's central piazza. Tyler, Bryan and some of the boys wanted to come up and meet us for dinner, so while we were waiting for them, we wandered up a windy street to check out some ruins that we had heard about, stopping along the way to ogle the unimaginably beautiful and expansive views of the entire city of Florence, all twinkling lights and romance. We eventually had to admit that we were all freezing, however, so we headed back down to a cute little pub to wait for the boys. Nicole's boyfriend is currently studying in Dublin and thus recommended to me a KILLER cider, Strongbow, which was cool, since I am really not much of a beer-drinker but always feel like such a loser ordering a vodka or something at a pub.
When the boys arrived, we headed over to the restaurant Tyler had in mind, but alas, our party of 13 would have overwhelmed the tiny hole-in-the-wall of a restaurant, and so we were directed across the street to a restaurant called Perseus. Upon looking at the menu, it all made sense - not only was this the restaurant that Irene had recommended to me for great bistecca alla fiorentina in Fiesole, but it was also a 2nd branch of the Perseus in Florence where my foodie Italian professor recommended that I take my friends Mike and Ani for - you guessed it - bistecca alla fiorentina when they came to visit me earlier in the semester. So not only was in the company of great friends but we were guaranteed great food as well. And the atmosphere didn't hurt either - between dinner and dessert, the boys discovered an old piano hiding in the corner and proceeded to serenade the entire restaurant, with Valenti and Tyler on the keys and Danny on vocals. Adorable. I love my friends.
After plates and plates of crostini, pappa al pomodoro, various pastas, and steaks in all shaped and sizes, we headed back to the pub for a drink while we waited for the hourly bus back to the city, which conveniently dropped my food coma-ed ass off right at the bottom of my hill (dear number 7, how I love thee). All I can say is - what a day, what a fine, fine day.
No comments:
Post a Comment