Florence, Day 16

Let's all take a moment and celebrate the fact that I am, for the first time this semester, completely caught up on my blog. This may not happen often, so I will enjoy this feeling of productivity while it lasts.

I slept in Saturday morning, which was quite nice. After breakfast, Gretchen and I caught the bus downtown to Linguaviva so that we could meet up with Ian and Isa for our trip to the gardens. We took an impromptu trip over to the park next to Fortezza da Basso for an antique fair that was going on, simply because we were curious and it was a beautiful day. Afterwards we took a leisurely walk down to Ponte Vecchio so that we could get to Palazzo Pitti, where the Bobli Gardens are.

Students who may be considering the ACM Florence program: please please please take advantage of your student museum card. We were able to get into the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens, plus 3 museum galleries in the palace for FREE because of these cards. Keep this card on you at all times and use it as much as you can because it is so worth it.

We ended up spending three hours in the garden alone and then about an hour more inside in the galleries. We couldn't take pictures inside the galleries but here are some from our time in the garden:

This block was missing a statue. Naturally, I filled in for the missing piece.

We ended up walking the entire garden. While I'm sure there are some corners we didn't turn and some rabbit trails we didn't follow, I'm pretty sure we saw 90% of the garden. Wow. Parts seemed a little wild, but it was still beautiful. We struck lucky with the weather too; it was such a gorgeous day, perfect for spending outside in a garden.

We walked back to Santa Maria Novella, stopping for gelato along the way (I tried chocolate-rum-raisin-orange, which is all one flavor, and it was so good), and hung out on the benches in front of the church for a while, making after-dinner plans. Eventually I headed back to the apartment for dinner; chicken burgers, liver and onions (of which I was not a fan), potatoes and onions, and grapes and apples. After dinner I went back out to Santa Maria Novella to go out with Gretchen, Isa, and Ian. We ended up meeting some German students who were traveling around Europe just playing their guitar and harmonica wherever they felt like stopping. I had no idea Florence was such an international university city!

All in all, a great day followed by a pretty good night.