Sunday, May 30, 2010

Sunday, May 23--Fiesole






We met up with Alex in Florence to return a cell phone he had loaned us, his road map atlas and the keys to the beach house. It sure was good to see his familiar face! He was so kind to us during our visit to Italy! Originally, we had hoped to take Anna and Alex to dinner this weekend, but that didn't work out with their schedule, so we settled for meeting on Sunday morning over coffee. We walked to a piazza and shared some of our travel stories. When Alex found out that we planned to go to Fiesole for the day, he offered to give us a ride there. Fiesole sits in the hills above Florence and is the site of the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, baths, and temples. Then even father up is a Franciscan abbey and church. We toured the ruins, took a break for lunch with a panoramic view of the city of Florence below and then toured the abbey before taking a bus back to Florence.

We were heading back to our room through the maze of street vendors that crop up daily in every little spot along the already narrow, busy streets surrounding the Duomo. Suddenly there was a parade of people in Medieval dress with colorful banners and drums. At the very end of the parade, was a group of falconers. Apparently, it was a parade in honor of the Feast of Pentecost. Later we saw some of the people from the parade continuing to celebrate Pentecost at one of the little bars on a side street.

We decided to do a light dinner tonight and get some pizza from a place that we had seen the previous night. It was one of those shops with a glass case full of a different varieties of pizza and I had my eye on a slice of procuitto and artichoke pizza. Sorry to say, it looked better than it tasted. Later, we Skyped with Courtney and Molly and got to see little glimpses of Alex and Gabe as they squirreled around in the background! As always, it was so good to see and hear from them. Hard to believe they are half a world away! Tomorrow we head for Roma, to meet up with Ryan and his friend Sam Kean from Sioux Falls, and our friends, the Vikens.

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