A Fresh View

Vacation brought with it family and friends and holidays and even though I stayed in Italy, lots of travelling. From Lucca to Pisa to Venice to Volterra to San Gimignano to Siena to Florence and Rome, the time passed just as unbelievably swiftly as it has throughout my entire Italian adventure. Bringing with it incredible memories and also fresh realizations on my Italian life.

My return to Florence with my family and boyfriend gave me a chance to see the city through new eyes. I wanted desperately to show them the city I know but found it impossible to wrap up the place I have come to adore for its idiosyncrasies in a two-day museum tour. How can you decide what is most important? Is it the David, or the duomo? The collection of art at the Uffizi gallery, or the panoramic view of the city from San Miniato? How do you show someone a piece of your life?

After hitting the most important monuments and museums and enjoying several good meals and drinks I still felt as if I had failed to reveal the true spell this city casts over me. Now that everyone is gone and I am back to a routine here I have come to realize where the difference lies. It is impossible to take a group of six people and reveal to them the magic of walking along the Arno on a solitary, cloudy, Florentine morning. Impossible to sit and listen to the symphony of language used by an old woman while doing something as simple as ordering her morning cappuccino. Hopeless to get them to feel the overpowering sense of significance when realizing this is the street that Dante walked on, and this is the same street I take to school every day.

Florence is inundated with tourists, hundreds, thousands, every day. I guarantee I am in more tourist photos than I can count simply by walking past the Duomo and through Piazza della Signoria on my way to school. Florence is a beautiful city that houses innumerable works of art both in museums and out, it deserves this tourism and attention. I love to travel, to see the churches and museums and famous works of art, to be a tourist. But I am happy to know that there is another layer here, one I have found to be just as fascinating, and just as beautiful. Eating my panino on church steps, wishing my favorite barista “buon anno,” returning home to red wine, homemade minestrone, and lively Italian conversation every night: it’s not the Florence you can put on a postcard—it’s my daily life, but it’s just as beautiful.