First we started our day off by meeting at the Duomo at noon. 18 people from our group ended up showing up. We took the bus from Firenze up to Fiesole. Fiesole is a small town of the province of Florence that has about 14,000 people. Fiesole is 5 mi northeast (and up the hills) of Florence. We were originally going to Fiesole to see the Etruscan ruins. Unfortunately that area of the city was closed by the time we got there, so we walked around the city for a few hours instead. Here are my pictures!
We got off the bus one stop too early and had to wait 20 minutes til the next bus came. This is the view up to Fiesole.
I went into a little shop near the bus stop and got this personal pizza. It was only 1.80 euro and it was SOO good! Prices definitely go down once you get out of the city!
This was the cemetery of San Domenico Church.
You can kind of see the Duomo in the center of the photograph. It's hard to tell but it was actually really sunny out, but there was some fog over the city so it made taking pictures zoomed in hard.
There were a bunch of these paintings on the gas panels along the streets of Fiesole. They were so good!
There were a bunch of olive trees up there.
We didn't have a map of Fiesole, so we just wandered around. The roads just kept going up and up and up! But it was beautiful!
If you look closely you can see all the mountains in the distance.
You could see the smoke from some people's houses!
There was a couple that was selling their homemade wine, sausage, and marmalades.
The doors in Fiesole were so tiny and cute!
For those of you that have seen/read Harry Potter. It's the whomping willow!! There were tons of them!
We were debating if we were going to stay and wait for sunset. We were all hungry though and it was only 3pm so we didn't feel like waiting that long. So we decided to head back down to Florence and come back up another day when it was closer to sunset time.
While we were up in Fiesole the sun felt so nice and warm! We all sat there for quite a while staring down at the city, facing the sun, and enjoying the peace and quiet. It was quite a change of pace from being in the city. We all enjoyed the Italian "art of doing nothing."
When we got back to Florence we went to a couple of the girl's apartment. Their apartment was really cool. I was ready to move in. It was two floors and had a balcony!
Their balcony, and some of the rooftops of Florence apartments.
We finally headed off to dinner! We went to Il gatto e la volpe. (The cat and the wolf.)
We did the family style, which was 15 euro a person. We got 2 bottles of water and 2 bottles of wine. (One white and one red.)
We also got some very good bread that we dipped in olive oil and/or balsamic.
Then we got some bruschetta as well as some crustini with a mushroom/garlic spread.
Then we got this enormous platter. It had 3 types of meats. Turkey, salami, and prosciutto. Fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, eggplant, roasted peppers and zucchini.
(Normally I do not like whole chunks of raw tomatoes. I ate them, and they were wonderful. Also, I am not a fan of chunks of peppers. I ate a whole pepper and wanted to go back for more but they were all gone!)
This was my first glass of wine (or any alcoholic beverage) that I had out in public without my parents! Yay for being legal in Italy and soon to be legal in the U.S.!!!
Please don't mind the crazy faces we're making. We were just all so excited about the food!
Then we received 3 (THREE) types of pasta. I have no idea what was in each one of them. I just know that they were ALL delicious!
This one was a chicken and broccoli risotto.
This was my attempt at being artistic!
We also got gelato today. (Because gelato everyday is totally okay!) The first flavor I got was limone (lemon), then hazelnut, and then nutella. However, this wasn't nutella flavored gelato. This was just a plain old big scoop of straight nutella! It was awesome! My tastebuds were just going crazy. (Yes I didn't plan out the whole lemon/chocolate combination. I just was looking at the flavors and started naming whatever sounded and looked good. In the end it actually wasn't bad! The lemon was really good! I could definitely go back for just a cup of that. It tasted like the best Italian ice you've ever had, but it's gelato!)
As you can tell I had a LOT of food today. I finished eating about 3 hours ago and I'm STILL stuffed. I probably won't be eating breakfast til late tomorrow. I hope you enjoyed the pictures!
A domani!
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