Ciao a tutti... my husband and I arrived to Florence on Friday and thought I would post some periodic updates. We are spending 8 nights in Florence as I will be taking Italian classes at Scuola Leonardo da Vinci starting tomorrow, so a bit of a different trip for us but we absolutely love Florence so we are excited!
Left Seattle midafternoon on Thursday, connected in CDG. We have never connected there--only flown in and out of, and it was... a lot. It took us nearly 2 hours between the plane landing until we were in the AirFrance lounge. Luckily we had a 4 hour connection. It wasn't necessarily confusing, the signage was clear, it was just SLOW and distances between things was long. I know that comes as no surprise to folks here but just adding it as a data point. Flight from CDG to FLR was quick and without issue.
Covid stuff: we are fully vaxxed and boosted, had Covid in January so got letters of recovery from our doctors, AND took proctored BinaxNow home tests just to be safe. AirFrance allowed us to upload our vax cards and dPLF ahead of time, so we were able to get our boarding passes with a "ready to fly" label without issue.
We are staying at an AirBNB right in the Piazza del Duomo. I know some may not love being right in the middle of things, but we couldn't pass this place up. The details and artwork are amazing and the view of the Duomo from the living and bedroom is really incredible. After we got settled in on Friday, we managed to shower and drag ourselves outside to get panini at All'Antica Vinaio and gelati before crashing around 7pm (we didn't sleep at all on the flight--even in business class!). Yesterday, (Saturday), we spent the day without plans just wandering around the city. Went for panini again from I Frattelini--it has a soft spot for us as it's right downstairs from the AirBNB we stayed at when we were here last and we just loved having it right there. It's actually quite crowded in the city which we've been surprised by! It was quieter when we were here in August.
This morning, we took at 8:30am train to Pisa to meet up with David from Pisa Explorers for a 2 hour walking tour. I highly recommend this tour if you're interested in learning about Pisa beyond the leaning tower! We booked it through AirBNB experiences. We wandered around the 4 quarters learning about the city's history before finishing at the Field of Miracles for some quintessential photos. I actually quite enjoyed Pisa--I often hear that "there's nothing there other than the tower" but I very much disagree and think it's worth at least half a day. I found the 2 hour tour to be perfect. From Pisa we headed to Lucca where we booked it to Pizzicheria La Grotta for lunch--we didn't plan well today and we were STARVING. Had a lovely, long leisurely lunch and wandered Lucca a bit before hopping on the 4:30pm train back to Firenze. We definitely short-changed Lucca but we were exhausted. We don't quite have our walking legs back and I get tired so much easier after having Covid. We're having a chill night in the apartment--might swing into the grocery store to pick up some dinner but we're still full from lunch!
Hoping things are a little quieter tomorrow after the weekend but we'll see. We don't have much booked or planned outside of a dinner on Wednesday night so very open to suggestions/recommendations, especially restaurants!