A long weekend in Florence

Posted on 2006/07/24 09:45:24 (July 2006).

[20th-24th July 2006]

In my endeavour of writing off as many leftover holidays as possible I decided to go to Florence for a long weekend.

As a matter of fact, I did choose the WORST weekend possible, the heatwave that is on Europe at the moment struck Italy at its highest during the last weekend, meaning that in Florence, which is particularly bad under the weather conditions point of view, had a whopping 39 degrees celsius all over the period that I spent there..

On the top of that the city is almost empty, there are only tourists milling around the city, and the atmosphere is not all that great.

Still, I decided to take a stroll in the center during Friday afternoon in a vain attempt to buy a Thirt that would go with my white short trousers, and the rest of the holiday was spent mostly at home doing nothing, as the heat was really unbearable.

In the evening I managed to hook up with my father, who recently moved to a new house and needed to be cheered up a little. I managed to sort out a date for my next move too, it's going to be around the 25th of August, and I'll be staying in the same place where I was before moving up north, a little depandance of my mother's house.

On Friday night, me, Gianfranco and Federico went to the Indian restaurant in Fiesole (extremely nice and quite cheap), and later we moved to the Festa dell'Unità in the center of Florence. Unfortunately the place was massively crowded and quite uneventful, but I managed to find a T-Shirt that I liked and we had a few "home brews" in a stand that makes its own beer.
It was a really great beer, especially the honey-beer, a place to go back in the future for sure.

We ended up Friday at a local pub for a brick of Guinness, and then off to bed.

Saturday was pretty much uneventful, in the evening we decided to go to yet another "Festa dell'Unità", but not in the center, on the hills around Florence.
The atmosphere and scope of the event was much lower than the previous day, but the temperature was not as bad as in Florence and we had some fun watching a sort of cabaret show that was talking about the recent World Cup.

That's it really, on Sunday I was on my way back to Milan, met a guy who works at Universal Music, chatted about a new Sting album coming out in October that is meant to be great (of course he's already listened to it), but apart from that it was an early night (after eating with Marta at Paola's place).

This week I hope to have some final responses from Japan, so that I can leave with my mind at ease, in any case I'll have to do some packing too, heavy packing this time!

Great set of photos, Lox. The curry is making me hungry! Are those murals "legal" and encouraged by the authorities?

Posted by Nigel at 2006/07/24 11:42:41.

Nigel: The curry was simply perfect, as for the murals I think that they are not legal, but the subway was so ugly that it actually makes it a lot better. There is also an homeless guy attending to the cleaning of the place, I think he's tolerated by the authorities, in the end he's doing something positive for the community.

Posted by Lox at 2006/07/24 24:22:19.

The entrance to the Duomo is rediculously elaborate isn't it?

I think that is marvellous - in Tokyo you'd just get a fire exit or something.

Posted by John at 2006/07/24 15:42:27.

John: It is quite marvellous, it took more than 100 (one hundred) years to make that church, you can see where all the work went into!! As for Tokyo after 4 years they probably would have decided to knowck it down to make a shopping mall :D

Posted by Lox at 2006/07/24 16:03:58.

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