We’ve been back from Italy for a week now, and I’ve been meaning to write a post about it. Really, I have! Other things have just gotten in my way – like work, and parties, and thank you note writing. I have decided it’s a good thing I didn’t write a post about the trip right away, because it took a while for it to actually set in that we had gone to Italy at all.
I’m not going to bore you with a list of the things we did, the places we saw, or the foods we ate. Suffice it to say, we saw a lot of amazing things, and ate some delicious meals. For example, here is a picture of our favorite piazza, Piazza della Signoria:
Who wouldn’t love a piazza full of statues of naked men?! As another example, here is the sample platter the owner of a local wine bar made us our first night in Florence:
Clockwise from 12 o’clock on this platter you see young Pecorino cheese, medium-aged Pecorino cheese, and well-aged Pecorino cheese, local olives, local pears, prosciutto, traditional salami, and Tuscan salami (which is softer and has fennel in it). There are also 2 locally-made jams on the plate: sweet white wine and fig.
Yup, that’s right, I went to Italy and all I have to talk about are naked men statues and food!
That’s not really true. Our trip was very interesting. It got off to a really interesting start. It took us over 13 hours to arrive in Florence, and when we walked into our hotel to check-in, we were informed that the hotel was full because of the large pharmaceutical convention going on in town. I had confirmed the reservation only 2 weeks before, so Alex and I looked at each other with identical “oh crap, now what do we do” expressions. But the gentleman only let us freak out for about 30 seconds before explaining that there had been some sort of computer glitch, and that they (Vivahotel Laurus al Duomo) were taking care of the mistake by putting us up in a nicer, more expensive, hotel across town. He even went outside and hailed a cab for us, then paid the driver to take us to the new hotel. And it turned out he wasn’t lying to get us out of his hair. We wound up dropped off in front of the Hotel Berchielli, unsure what our reception was going to be. Our apprehensions were unfounded, though, because we were checked in immediately and brought to our room, where we discovered our view was this:
Not too shabby! The hotel was very nice, too, we were thoroughly impressed and happy with our experience.
Something Alex and I were quite surprised by was how happy the Italians were to have American tourists in Florence. We were told over and over again that they haven’t been getting many Americans, and we were always treated very well. Also interesting to us was that the only Americans we met were from the New York area. And the people we met were always really friendly – which backs up my belief that New Yorkers really get a bad rap, because we are generally much friendlier than we are given credit for. We even ran into one couple twice – first on our wine tour of the Chianti region, and then at a little restaurant in the Oltrarno section of Florence where we stopped to have pizza for lunch one afternoon.
All in all, Alex and I will definitely be heading back to Italy as soon as we can swing it!
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