Florence, Take Two
What was I thinking when I took a day trip to Florence with my 8-year-old daughter?
More importantly, who was I kidding? Florence in a day?
To be fair, I needed to escape Rome.
Just days earlier, I had managed to fall down a flight of steps and have my wallet stolen—all within the same day. If there were an award for "Most Chaotic Tourist," I was certainly in the running.
Looking back, I think grief had something to do with it.
My husband of twenty years died in 2021. In the years afterward, I often felt slightly off balance—emotionally, mentally, and occasionally quite literally.
So naturally, I decided that a whirlwind trip to Florence was the solution.
This time, however, my daughter and I are doing it right. Instead of squeezing Florence into a single exhausting day, we're spending four days there.
My first visit to Florence was with Chris. What I remember most is how different it felt from Rome. Rome buzzes with energy. Florence seems to exhale.
We spent our days wandering narrow streets with no particular destination, stopping whenever we found a café that looked promising. We ate gelato daily, which remains one of the best travel decisions I've ever made.
That trip also happened to be our tenth wedding anniversary.
While we were there, Chris bought himself a leather valise after a lengthy search through Florence's leather shops. This was highly unusual. Shopping ranked somewhere between doing taxes and going to the dentist on Chris's list of favorite activities. FYI, Chris had deep gum cleaning for a year after his long trip backpacking in Southeast Asia. I guess toothpaste was not in his budget.
But he found the perfect one.
The valise came home with us and became part of his everyday life. He carried it to work for years—right up until his last day of work in 2021.
Of all the souvenirs we brought home from Florence, that leather bag became the most meaningful. Not because of the leather, but because it carried a piece of that trip with him every day. A reminder of our anniversary, our travels, and a season of life when our biggest decision was where to get lunch and whether we had room for another scoop of gelato.
We also visited the Galleria dell'Accademia to see Michelangelo's David.
Before I met Chris, museums weren't really my thing. He changed that. He taught me to slow down and appreciate what was inside them—from the Terracotta Army to the masterpieces of the Rijksmuseum.
And then there was David.
I still remember turning a corner and seeing the statue in the distance.
Maybe memory has polished the moment over the years, but I can still picture it clearly. The photographs never capture the scale. Standing before it, even someone with no formal knowledge of art can appreciate Michelangelo's genius.
It stopped me in my tracks.
This time, I want to share that experience with my daughter.
I also plan to take her to the Leonardo da Vinci Interactive Museum. She's creative, curious, artistic, and dyslexic. Some historians and researchers have suggested that Leonardo da Vinci may have been dyslexic as well.
Whether that theory is ever proven isn't really the point.
I want my daughter to see that many of history's greatest thinkers viewed the world differently. I want her to understand that differences aren't flaws to overcome. They're often strengths waiting to be discovered.
If Leonardo teaches her anything, I hope it's this:
The very thing that makes you different may one day become your greatest gift.
And unlike our first whirlwind visit, this time we'll have four whole days to discover Florence together.
