Written by Allie, High School/Pre-College Student Correspondent for Italian Food, Art, and Society in Florence, Summer 2018
Another week in Florence complete, that means we’re halfway done with the program. These past two weeks have somehow gone by so fast yet so slow. Everyday feels like a week but in the best way possible. We have been doing and exploring so much in these weeks I don’t know how there is still more of Florence that we haven’t seen. A common weekday here in Florence starts in the Morning, we leave the house at around 8:30 to head to the CET building. Class starts at 9 but it only takes about 10 minutes to get there so most days we stop at a nearby cafe to grab a coffee or try a new pastry. Our core class is normally two hours in the morning, then some days we have Italian language class and some days we have a longer lunch breaks. After lunch the schedule varies day to day, during our week focusing on art, we went to a different museum each afternoon. During our food week we did an activity relating to food in the afternoon. After our activity we normally have free time for the rest of the day. Sometimes we go shopping, other days we get aperitivo, and some days we hang out in our apartment and make dinner there. The only downside to doing so much everyday is that it is very tiring.
Since days can get long and frantic, it’s nice to have some time to do nothing and just hang out. We have two places like this. One is our big apartment, we each have our own bedrooms and we have a nice kitchen and living room area that we all hang out in. The second place that we have is the many piazzas that we are surrounded by. One piazza that I mentioned in my last blog post is Piazza Michelangelo which is a beautiful but very crowded piazza. I think that my favorite piazza is Santa Croce, this is partly because it is about a 2 minute walk from our apartment but also because it is very calm, not many people and almost always somebody playing live music in the nighttime. A couple other piazzas that are very nice at night are the Piazza della Repubblica, this piazza is very fun because it has a Carousel and it also has a rooftop cafe called La Terrazza which has a great view of the whole piazza. Right now, the square is undergoing a lot of construction so the view doesn’t look too good but I can imagine after the construction is done it will be very beautiful. The piazza around the Duomo is also very pretty but very crowded since the Duomo is such a popular tourist attraction, there is always a huge line waiting to get in.
A couple fun things that we have done in the past week include going on a hike up to San Miniato Church and in the hills, we also went to Fiesole and explored there some, lastly we went to Bologna today. I am looking forward to the next two weeks and all the fun things we have planned.