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Showing posts with label Fiesole. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiesole. Show all posts

Thursday, July 26, 2018

Touring Hilly Fiesole outside Florence (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Touring Hilly Fiesole Outside Florence (Italy) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


I read that the Italians were formal dressers, so I brought knee-length skirts with me as well as short-sleeved blouses. 

I did not want to be turned away from visiting churches due to skimpy and inappropriate attire.  All the churches have signs outside them that tell visitors to cover up shoulders and not wear shorts and mini skirts in them.    

There are security guards and church ladies in the churches who will make you leave for trying to enter a church dressed inappropriately.  If you protest, they will tell you to file a police report.  (That could take two days out of your tourism.)

This formal attire was making me lose pounds in water-weight loss, though, as we walked around sweating in lines at museums.

After visiting Santa Croce that morning and admiring the Giotto Frescoes, which reminded me of Greek Byzantine painting from Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) in its composition style, I went back to the hotel, showered, and took a siesta.

Laurent was still sleeping when I woke up, so I made some notes about Florence in my journal that I would verify later:

Florentines like music and the arts.  Even when we were in non-touristy areas, I saw workshops where crafts were being made.  Magazines for young people seem to have a few articles about the arts, too.

Vespa scooters and cars without mufflers seem to be the favorite mode of transportation.  Old and young alike ride on and in them.

Vespas are more practical in the center of town, because the streets are pretty narrow.

We took the bus up the hills around Florence to Fiesole, where it was cooler.  There were gardens full of sculpture on the way up the hills and homes with ochre-colored walls and orange-crescent tiles on roofs.

The homes in Fiesole have panoramic views over the city of Florence below, which we could also see from the bus windows.

We visited the Roman ruins in Fiesole.  I wondered if there were any famous Romans lived there.  The Roman museum, we visited held Etruscan as well as Roman artifacts.

I wanted to learn more about the mysterious Etruscans, who were Tuscany’s original inhabitants.

The Roman circular theatre in Fiesole has been used since antiquity.  We saw a poster that was advertising a performance of A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.  I wanted to see Shakespeare performed in the language of Dante.

“Too expensive,” Laurent said.

The church in Fiesole was closed for the siesta.  We ordered a pizza with prosciutto and drank a bottle of fizzy San Pellegrino water.  We drizzled olive oil on our pizza and savored each salty bite.

I took out our map of Florence and tried to pick out the monuments that we could see from our pizza parlor garden dining spot.

Brunelleschi’s dome on the Duomo was the landmark for identifying other landmarks.

We did aerial tourism from the pizza place until the bus came to take us back to Florence, giggling about our cheap tourism to a ritzy ‘burb of Florence.


By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books




Ruth Paget Selfie