Florence, Italy

JUNE 2009

**View of Florence from Piazzle Michelangelo**

A decade ago I traveled to Italy for a summer language program with my university. I was minoring in Italian therefore I needed to go to Italy to study. I would have loved to study abroad for a whole semester but since I was a collegiate athlete competing in both Fall and Spring semesters my only time to go abroad was during the summer.

So this is not a recent trip, but since I have this adventure travel blog.. I DO WHAT I WANT. And so here are snippets of my time spent in Italy.

Okay, a little more background, that you didn’t ask for…Italy was always my #1 country to visit. I am a big history, language nerd and Italy seemed to be birth of so much history and civilization. I was also really into mythology and Roman gods growing up, ie. nerd. Then since I was always interested in languages, and since I already studied Spanish and French in high school I picked Italian as a minor to my business degree. ..See it all falls into place.

My days in Florence were spent going to classes at Centro linguistico italiano dante alighieri during the morning and touring around the city in the afternoons. I went to museums like the Uffizi Gallery to see Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and to the Galleria dell’Academia to see Michelangelo’s David. I joined my classmates and roommates for meals of traditional Italian cuisine like margherita pizzas and pesto gnocchi. And I didn’t go a day without getting gelato—my one true love. I stayed with a host family in Florence along with two other women in my program as well as other students studying from around the world. We always had a full, large table for the several courses of traditional Italian dinner. At one time we had people from seven different countries at dinner. Our program took excursions like to the countryside to Villa Gamberaia, to Castello di Verrazzano for wine tasting in the Chianti area of Tuscany, and a day trip to San Gimignano and Siena. And on some weekends a few of us went on trips to Elba/Pisa and Rome. Then after the program I went to tour around solo in Venice, Turin, and Cinque Terre (one of my first extended solo trips abroad, at the age of 22). I had an action-packed month long visit in Italy and it’s one of my favorite places. Hopefully it won’t be another decade before I go back.