Arrivederci, Italia

From Rome, Zoe and I made our way back to Florence by train to spend a couple of our last nights with her host family. And let me pause here to tell you her host family is absolutely amazing. Debora and Eugenio are so typically Italian it's awesome. They set out breakfast for us each morning, made sure we had dinner at night, and Eugenio even drove us to the train station two mornings during our stay when we were making our day trips to Cinque Terre and Venice. Eugenio speaks really good French so it was nice for me to be able to talk to him. One time during dinner he and I were in deep conversation, he looks over to Zoe to bring her into our conversation and she looks at him exasperated and says, "I don't speak French!" Speaking to me in French, he had forgotten to switch back to Italian to speak to her! They were a wonderful host family, both to me and Zoe.

We got in to Florence on Friday night. We had dinner with Debora and Eugenio and the next day we took a day trip to Cinque Terre and visited two of the five cities--Vernazza and Riomaggiore. It took us about two hours to get there from Florence. Each of these cities is very small, with Vernazza being the biggest and most popular, which is where we started. These cities are right on the coast and when we got off the train we made our way down to the ocean. At noon while Zoe and I were eating our lunch along the coast, ferry boat after ferry boat came to the docks, offloading hundreds of tourists onto this little city, overloading it! It made you wonder where the locals were, if they had evacuated the town at the beginning of tourist season and we're going to come back in a couple months once everyone was gone. 

Vernazza

Such tourism

The cool thing to do between these cities is hike the trail that runs between them. This can take a couple days and as Zoe and I had only a few hours before we had to head back to Florence, we hiked only as far as we could go without entering the national park. Before leaving Vernazza, we bought some obligatory gelato and then made a quick stop to Riomaggiore before heading home. 

Sunday took us to another Italian city, this time to Venice. We hopped back on the train at Firenze Santa Maria Novella Station and in two hours we were in Venezia. Venice was yet another Italian town crawling with tourists. Zoe had been to Venice before years ago with her family but I'd never been there and was amazed by all of the water surrounding the city! The canals are amazing, similar to the canals we saw in Amsterdam, and yet so different. We walked around the city all day, popping into stores selling Murano glass and trying not to buy everything! 

Loving these canals

We visited St. Mark's Cathedral and square which were really pretty. The only thing we didn't get to do in Venice was go on a gondola ride. This was something I really wanted to do but it was 80 Euros for a half an hour gondola ride and we just couldn't justify that to ourselves. Next time I visit it is a must!

St. Mark's Cathedral and square

Today was Zoe's and my final day in Florence. We had a couple things we had to get done like last-minute gift purchasing and plane ticket printing, but other than that we had a relaxing day. We visited the baptistry and had purchased tickets to walk up the Duomo but an hour into the line, we realized we just didn't have time to do it all today, so that is another thing on my to-do list when I am back in Italy! We did, oddly enough, have time to fit in paninis at All'Antico Venaio, the best panini shop in Florence, and of course there is always time for a gelato run.

And with that, Zoe and I had to part ways. She is headed back to the states tomorrow and I am spending the night in Pisa before flying to Paris tomorrow morning. She and I visited a total of 10 cities in 24 days in 6 countries. We did our best to tackle as much of Europe as we could, and our crazy May adventure was a success by all accounts! 

Walked by the Leaning Tower tonight!