View from Piazza Michaelangelo
In front of Ponte Vecchio
Duomo views
So this past weekend, the roommates and I went to Florence and got to see many things. We arrived there in the late morning on saturday, and left mid afternoon on sunday. When we got there, we checked into our hostel and relaxed for a bit. We realized we were wasting time by sitting around, so we decided to walk towards the center part of the city, and we came across the Duomo. It's this massive basilica on top of this huge church, which i believe is a gothic church, and you're able to hike to the top to see an amazing view over the city. All of us signed up immediately, and decided to ascend up all 463 steps. Roughly halfway up, you're able walk this tight path up in the inside of the basilica, and you can get right up next to the frescos that were painted in such amazing detail. As we kept walking, the stairwell got steeper and narrower. When we finally reached the top, the view was better than expected; just an amazing view of the city and the surrounding hills in the backdrop, with the larger snow-covered mountains sitting in the distance. When we got to the bottom, we grabbed some lunch and walked around peeking into churches and walking over the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge). Soon before sunset, zach-man decided to head up to the piazza michaelangelo, to watch the sunset and see a great view of the city from the other side of the river. Even though it was a bit nippy, we managed to stay up there a while during sunset. We then took a bus back to our hostel and took an hour or so nap before dinner. Because it was one of my roommates, gabe's 21st bday, we decided to take him out to a nice dinner and then head to the clubs. The nightlife isn't as great as the nightlife here in Rome, but we found a cool club called 21, where it was all blue lights with white stucco walls. Kinda cave-like. You could say we all enjoyed our night in our respective ways, with some great stories throughout the night. Everyone survived, thank god. Sunday wasn't too pleasing because we all felt the wrath of saturday night pretty hard, but had to get up and go see the David. Luckily, the line wasn't too long and we got inside in no time. The David was definitely bigger than I thought, but was still really cool to see how detailed one could get, even back then with the limited tools they were allotted. The rest of the day consisted of walking around a flea market and taking a long train ride back. Overall, Florence was amazing, and I would strongly recommend everyone to do all the things I did. Solid weekend for sure.
