Day 5

Today we were finally leaving Rome and making our way towards Florence!  I was so excited, except we were actually stopping along the way to visit the ancient medieval town called Vertibo.  Despite it being really dreary outside, this walled-in town was particular charming.  I loved the churches here.  They were so different from the churches in Rome because instead of the arched marble ceilings, they were high, flat wooden ceilings, giving the person below an entirely different experience.  I also spent a lot of time wandering up and down the streets of these little town.  I stumbled upon a little corner bookstore.  I decided to buy a little baby board book about a cow named Mooka to help me learn some basic Italian.  The woman in the store though could not understand that I wanted the book for myself.  She kept on trying to wrap the book in baby-themed wrapping paper thinking it was a present for some non-existent little child.  My lunch a few hours later ended up being my favorite meal so far in Italy.  Some friends and found the most quaint little Italian café, hidden under a little archway.  This restaurant was clearly not a tourist spot, which I really liked.  It was filled with all these interesting looking Italian people either having lively conversations or simply reading a newspaper over their cappuccino.  We sat down expecting a menu, only to find out that there was no menu.  The waiter told us what was available that day (all in Italian).  Luckily there was a girl in my group who understood most of what he was saying.  I ended up ordering a vegetable soup (zuppe verdure).  Zuppe (pronounced zoopay) is one of my favorite Italian words.  This soup was SO DELICIOUS!  It had kale, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, and celery, and some scrumptious bread soaking in it too.  As my dad would say, it hit the spot. 

            Right as we were leaving Vertibo to get to Florence, it started to rain.  It was raining harder when we arrived in Florence, which made lugging our heavy luggage two blocks to our hotel a very difficult task.  But I was too excited to care, because I was finally in Florence!  I knew I loved it already: all the buildings had terracotta roofs and bright green shutters on the windows.  Each building was a different shade of a burnt yellow or orange. The cobblestone streets.  The balconies at the tops of the buildings filled with pots of flowers.  Everything was so quaint.  We got there in the evening and it got dark quickly, so there was no time to explore until the next day.  However, the restaurant in Florence understood the vegetarian diet better than the hotel in Rome, which was nice.  Our vegetable course for that evening’s dinner consisted of beans (finally!) and broccoli which I had been craving for quite a while.  Yay vegetables!