Moving Day - Rome to Florence

Today was moving day number one, as we left Rome and headed to Florence.

We are doing our travel by train for the next few moves, so I bought a Eurorail pass in advance and made train reservations on all the major trains. Just know if you go this route, you should get to the train station at least an hour early for your first trip as you need to go to the information office and get it stamped before you can get on the train. This will take 60 seconds, but inevitably you will get stuck behind a family that bought train tickets a year ago and have no receipt and is now being rebooked on a 10 city tour. It is also very hot in the train station which ups the stress level as you watch your departure time grow ever closer.

One of the great things about Eurorail is that the tickets are for first class, which makes the train a little more bearable, despite the marginal a/c. I think I am making this sound worse than it was, mainly because I thought I lost the tickets as the train was leaving the station and I had a minor melt down. Turns out they were still with me and after some breathing exercises I was back to normal.

The train to Florence was great, left on time and arrived early. The train station in Florence is nicer than the one in Rome, which we began to see was a trend. It was a happy accident, but I am very glad we went to Rome before Florence, it is a lot nicer, cleaner and more fashionable city.

Once we arrived, we took a cab to our hotel, the San Firenze Suites. It is right in the middle of all the action and the room is big with a great bathroom. It is an easy walk to all the attractions, but for the first walk we went across the river to  Piazzale Michelangelo. It is a bit of a hike up several flights of stairs in the heat, but the view is amazing, you can see all of Florence and there is a one of several copies of the famous David statue up there.

One thing I discovered along the way is that artists like to decorate traffic signs in Italy, if I can ever get my pictures to post (having some technical difficulties) I will add the ones I have found so far.

For dinner we went to the restaurante at Cucina Torcicoda; they have three places to eat there and the restaurant is the most high end. It came highly recommended and lived up to the billing. More expensive than the places we ate in Rome, but still very good.

The View of Florence