Florence, Italy - July 2019

Our visit to Florence started with abandoning our car at a parking garage somewhere near our hotel (we hoped). GPS doesn’t work so well in a dense area of buildings with very narrow one-lane one-way streets mixed with pedestrian-only streets. After driving around in circles for half an hour guided by the Google Maps woman with bad Italian pronunciation 😉, we made one slight error and found we were now twice as far from our hotel as when we started. So the closest “P” was a welcome sight!

On foot, we finally found our hotel, Hotel Davanzati...great location and good room with amazing AC - essential in this 33 degree heat - and super comfy bed BUT it had a bad odour that you really only noticed when you first entered and then you got used to it. We didn’t find out until our last evening when we met a couple from Sweden and a woman from Calgary/Atlanta (who has stayed at the hotel many times) that this was not normal.

On the first afternoon, we wandered aimlessly taking in the beauty of Florence. First stop Ponte Vecchio (basically the only place I knew)! Breathtaking!

The second day we downloaded Rick Steves’ self-guided audio tour and we were therefore a lot more methodical with the sights we saw. Since we are definitely not the “follow-the-flag” kind of tour people, we would highly recommend these free audio tours...our first time using but won’t be our last.

We capped off our visit to Florence with a delicious dinner at Trattoria Za Za at the recommendation of our Italian friend, Rossella, and despite feeling apprehensive at the thought of eating 1 kg of steak (shared between us of course!), we managed to do so and still had room for flourless chocolate cake!