Illegal Pictures and the Thousand Stairs of Florence

Friday afternoon we left our lovely apartment in La Spezia and headed over to Florence. Once we arrived there we pulled out our map of where our hotel was and pretended to know where we were going. We walked down the street and over a couple blocks dragging our luggage across the old, uneven brick street. The side walk was no wider than me and my bag, and while pulling 2 bags and people walking in the opposite direction made it near impossible for me to make my way successfully down the street. I pulled one bag on the sidewalk and the other on the street and almost had it run over by multiple cars. All I cared about was making it to our hotel, in one piece or not.

Not far down the street was our hotel which was in tight space and had an old, Italian style. After we were settled in we went for a walk out on the town without looking at the map and managed to slightly lose our way. But not to worry, our navitron woman (me) found where we were and brought us to a lovely cafe for some sandwiches and coffee. A ridiculous 40 euro later, we paid, left and then explored the town.

Navitron brought us down "rich alley" as we passes stores like Dolce and Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and a Ferrari store. It was a beautiful walk and each store was in such a uniquely styled building. We continued down this rich street and ended up at The Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore Cathederial (which is the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Flowers). Once we turned the corner, I was in complete shock at the massiveness of this building. It took almost a whole day just to walk around this thing! We got there too late in the day to take any tour, but the outside alone was enough to satisfy our needs.

Our first days ended very peacefully with dinner and a couple glasses of wine at a recommended nearby restaurant called La Gratella. The people working there were very nice and the food was delicious. We even splurged and got dessert to. Lets just say, it was gone in about 20 seconds, and mostly on Haylee's face.

The next day we needed to check out at 11:00am, but still wanted to see much of the city. The hotel was nice enough to let us keep our luggage there while we did more traveling during the day. We finally found where the accademia where Michelangelo's David is. We explored many different sculptures before we finally game into the huge room where David stood. I did not realize that we could not take pictures but I was determined to prove that I had been there and seen it with my own eyes. there were signs saying it was "prohibited to take any pictures inside". But it was a success. In fact, I became so courageous after this that I continued to take many more pictures of the entire museum. It was thrilling and frightening all at the same time.

After stealing pictures of David we walked to an opposite end of the city and wanted to climb to the top of hundreds of stairs. And it literally was that, but it was far too hot to slow down or even thinking about sitting down, I just wanted to be at the top and be finished! Luckily there was a gellato shop at the top so we all rewarded ourselves from surviving the stairs of death by trying a new kind of gellato and enjoyed it at the top of the stairs. We walked over to the look out sections and could see the entire city from above. It really portrayed how vast and beautiful everything was. Once we finished taking pictures and exploring the top of the city, we began the huge hike back to the bottom so we could get back to our hotel to pick up our bags and go back to the train station to go to Rome.

We all wanted to cry of exhaustion and were all dripping discussing sweat when we returned, but managed to get our bags and go just 2 more blocks to the station. We got on our nice and big train only to find out that something had happened with Rachelle's ticket because she lost her seat. So she stood for quite come time before some poked moved around and gave her a chair to sit in. It was like a puzzle! We were on our way to tourist central...bring it on Roma!!