This one time.... I went to Italy.: Under the Tuscan Sun

This weekend was our first group weekend trip and we went to Firenze (Florence).

Florence was lovely - out of all the of the Italian cities I've visited so far, this is the one I could see myself actually living in. First of all, it's a river town (a real river this time, the Arno), so it felt a little bit like home. But also, since there are no hills, it's a very active town, people were always running or riding bikes around and it just had a very vibrant, alive feeling to the town - metropolis without being chaotic. We did a ton of things in Firenze, so I'm going to hit the highlights in vague collective form.

Churches. We went to a lot of them, including the Duomo, the Chiesa di Santa Croce, the Chiesa di Santa Maria Novella, and the Chiesa di San Miniato al Monte. I saw some really cool things in those various churches, most notably - Brunelleschi's Dome. We actually climbed to the top (400+ stairs) and got a great view of the city! Other cool things in other various churches include: tombs/memorials to Galileo, Michelangelo, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Raphael, paintings by Cimabue, the first painting with one point perspective (Masaccio's The Trinity), frescoes by Giotto, the Ghiberti's doors etc etc etc. There's basically so much awesome art and history in Italy that it's overwhelming to create a list. The names and references probably also don't mean all that much to anyone who hasn't studied it, so I'll just say it was awesome and you guys can trust me.

Scaled that. Using stairs, obviously. It's hard to get a good picture with scale of these buildings understood.

View from the top of the dome!

View of the city.

Ghiberti's doors.

Speaking of art - we went to Galleria dell'Academia and saw Michelangelo's David and Prisons and also went to the the Galleria degli Uffizi and saw lots of famous paintings by Botticelli (Primavera and The Birth of Venus), along with art by Giotto, Duccio, Cimabue, the Lorenzetti Brothers, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rafael, and Titian. Lots of cool things. Quite frankly, a lot of it was only interesting because we've studied the pieces in our Art History class, but still, some of the paintings were really famous and it was neat to see them in person. The size of the paintings always surprise me when I see them in real life, whether they are smaller or bigger. On a sad side note, these museums are uptight and don't allow pictures. But feel free to either use your imagination or Google.

Markets - leather everywhere. Also, a great place to try a tripe sandwich (a specialty of the region), which I did. In case you were wondering - it's cow stomach. I wasn't all that much of a fan, but I would eat it again if I had no other options. And in Italy, gelato is always another options. So I probably won't be eating it again.

Piazzas - Like always, some of my favorite memories are the hours I spend just hanging out in the piazzas of Italy, soaking up sun and hanging out with my friends, playing the "where are those tourists from?" game. Americans - you are so easy to spot.

The Arno River - So pretty! I enjoyed being by a real river. All other "rivers" I've seen in Italy have been about the size of the creek in my back yard.

Sunset on the Arno.

On Saturday, seven of us took a day trip to le Cinque Terre, a region on the west coast of Italy, where there are five little towns right on the edge of the water. It's absolutely gorgeous, and we got to hike which was one of the first time since I've been here that I got to do some outdoorsy, nature-y things and I was totally digging it. This was simply the prettiest place I've been so far. I'll just post pictures because otherwise you won't believe me. We hiked for about four hours, and saw three of the five cities in the Cinque Terre - and the whole experience was surreal, since I remember learning about the area in Italian class last year.