Submitted by Angelina Gargiulo on the 2020 winter session program in Italy sponsored by the Department of History…
The most challenging thing that I’ve found about this program so far was navigating the city whilst being here a few days earlier than the class. Being in a country so new to me, I had never dealt with European geography. Having my boyfriend, Ben, with me greatly helped, but he had never been to Europe himself, so we spent much of our first three days exploring. From the minute that the chaos of flying international was over and our delayed flight finally landed, still very exhausted, both of us were fully aware we were about to tame a beast completely new to us. For very much of the first day, with the exception of a decently long initial nap, we walked in what felt like circles. Every street looked the same to me that day, other than the palazzo with the carousel where we seemingly always ended up.
In order to deal with our lack of familiarity of the city structure of Florence, we decided to walk around most of the city and make almost a mental map during our first days alone. I usually have a very good sense of direction, so my curiosity and need to understand my surroundings was inevitably the first thing I wished to address in Italy. With the help of cheating a little bit with Google maps when we did finagle phone service and some locals when they did speak English, we walked to many places our class was going to cover and then some.
We immediately stumbled upon the Duomo the first evening, followed by the strip of designer stores a few blocks to its right from the direction of the hotel. Shortly after a little bit of seemingly essential Italian shopping, we ate at one of the restaurants on the recommended list that we found closest to us. Probably from exhaustion from jet lag, I don’t recall the name of the restaurant. There was where I first dealt with a physical monetary exchange, and even better yet, my first Italian meal. By the time the rest of the class arrived on Sunday, we had wandered to the Palazzo Vecchio, Museo Galileo, the Medici Palace, the Cathedral of Santa Maria, and probably others that I just didn’t know of at the time. We ate out at three restaurants and numerous cafes, all scattered across the city. I was very familiar with the city pretty quickly, and even took initiative to kind of lead the way on our Monday scavenger hunt with my new friends.
I am really happy I challenged myself to become familiar with the city prior to the class being started. The ability to recommend places to go with my classmates and help everyone out when they had general questions about the location of places made the experience a lot more enjoyable to me. However, I am fully aware that I do have a lot more to explore and I’m very excited to see more and do more as this Florentine adventure progresses.
