Mon Coeur

If you had asked me 8 months ago how I felt about this city, I would've replied, I'm not in love with it, convenience is not in the Italian vocabulary, there's dog poop everywhere, and the bongo players in the square play until all hours of the night, I'm not ready for graduate school, I don't know what I'm doing here, it doesn't feel like home, I don't know these people, I don't know if I will ever care about these people, it was never love at first sight.

And then, somewhere along the way, I accidentally fell in love with this city. And I'm so fucking thankful that Firenze, invaded by thousands of American students is still so Italian. I adore walking out of the palazzo and taking 30 steps to corner panino or gusta pizza or for a one euro cappuccino. After 9 months these photographs of these buildings have somehow gained weight in my life. They're not just photos of random pretty buildings I took on vacation, that I'll never look at again. Which btw, tourists do far too often around here.

They are of this city I adore in it's entirety. If it had been up to me, I never would've chosen Italy because it always made me uncomfortable, the idea of living in a country where I couldn't understand the language. And now I'm glad I never had a choice in the matter.


A view of Palazzo Vecchio, the Pitti Palace in my backyard, Santo Spirito, my home and Piazza della Repubblica.



Santa Croce home to the blessed international market festival where we spent the day devouring everything edible that was non-Italian, and on the way there where we discovered the Lion's Fountain, Kikuya, American breakfast, Tijuana, Red Garter, the dollar store, serafina gelateria, Yellow, and the best kebab's in Firenze




San Lorenzo looks really cute in miniature doesn't it? And Piazza della Repubblica, we walk through it almost every single day, this beautiful piazza, perhaps my favorite in Firenze, and it's simply on the way home




Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria was the site of our first pub crawl, our EU simulation, home to the fake David, and where we knew before we got a grasp of the city that if we ended up there in the middle of intoxicated nights that we were close to home.