Florence Day 3- Old Friends

Today was our last day in Florence and I found it very very hard to leave.  I have found that I definitely feel at home in this city.  I could mostly find my way around from Piazza to Piazza from memory, even getting us all the way to school.  There are definitely some things about Florence that have changed in the last 10 years.  The most noticeable one is how much cleaner the city is now.  It's a CLEAN city, not just less dirty, but clean! It felt so fresh compared to the bustling chaos of Rome.  I knew I loved the city, but I love it even more now. 

A few days ago I got a message on my Facebook wall from a friend I met while abroad in Florence, but we hadn't really kept in touch over the years.  Her birthday is only a few days after mine.  She saw my birthday Facebook post about being in Italy and commented, asking where I was because she was coming to Italy for her birthday as well.  Turns out we crossed paths in Florence for half a day and planned a time to meet for lunch!

We started the day with a trip to the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens.  The Pitti Palace is a large villa essentially, that has several gardens behind it, laid out quite nicely.  The palace itself is home to many exhibitions and mini "museums" which are essentially their permanent exhibitions.  There was one that we wanted to see that houses some of the old Renaissance masters.  We also wanted to walk through the Boboli Gardens.  What we found however, which was sort of annoying, was that the Palace had two different ticket options.  Each about 13 Euro, but only gave you access to HALF of what was at the palace.  Of course, the museum we wanted to see was on a different ticket than the Boboli Gardens.  We decided to just go with the ticket for the gardens. 

While the gardens itself is impressive in its expanse and intricate layout, there were no flowers this time of year.  We walked around for a bit, but the most interesting part was one of the grottos that were built near the fortress wall in a corner of the garden.

When we were done I decided that I'd really like to just walk around Florence a bit more and take it all in (aka, starting to get anxious that we have to leave!)

We wandered back through the leather market in San Lorenzo square and walked through the inside market with delicious cheeses, meats, wine and pastas.  We ended up right outside the restaurant, Trattoria Zaza, where we were meeting my friend and her boyfriend.

On the way back to our hotel we stopped and grabbed some gelato at Grom, near the Duomo.  Justin really wanted to try their fig flavor and their ricotta cheesecake flavor. 

We packed up and said farewell to our exquisite hotel room and my favorite city in Italy, before heading off to the train station to grab a train out to Bologna!