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Travel Bloggers

Ali
Katie

The Arno Bridge and River, Florence, Italy

In many of my previous blogs, I’ve mentioned how many different and unique people you will meet along your travels and how many I met along mine.

While in line at the Uffizi, I met a great couple from Iowa who were in Italy for their annual vacation together after six years of marriage. They chose Florence as one of their three cities to visit while in Italy (Venice and Naples were their other two) and I asked them if they picked the right ones so far. Neither one of them answered right away so I let it go. It wasn’t until we got to the Arno Bridge that one of them mentioned their reasoning for choosing Florence.

The Arno Bridge has become the epitome of what “my Italy” stood for in the past centuries where I imagine little fat Italian men selling fresh bread on a sunny morning before the chill wears off, or where grapes were sold in bunches bigger than my head and tiny children fought over who rode on their father’s shoulder as he walked down the cobblestone streets on a quiet afternoon.

I’d like to think at one point all the bridges, including the Arno, represented a passageway into a new part of Florence that showed off its prototypical Italianness in that there were people proudly displaying their culture through tiny cafés and pizzerias where the cooks flipped dough in the air. That and actually speaking Italian!

Instead, I and the traveling couple, found peddlers chanting in English, the streets were dirty and not cobblestone, and the kids sent out alone, probably trying to pickpocket the unsuspecting tourists.

Despite all this, the couple told me through each other’s sentences that they still chose the right city to visit. They were enjoying themselves in a city new to both of them and they felt fortunate to have come this far together.

I sought out my own answer… was it wise to come to Florence? and I agreed with the couple from Iowa. There was something ancient still and worldly about Florence’s appearance. Much like all of Europe AND America, things will never be as they were or even how they could be. We live in a generation of spoiled and tainted societies. But I was new in Florence. I was in Italy, the farthest I’d been from home, and felt fortunate to have visited such a place and to me, the idiosyncrasies that once made up the Italian culture (we’ve been skewed by television and movies) still exist if only for brief moments.