Okay, I´ve said it a million times so I´m not going to elaborate. This place is beautiful, see the Verona blog and just change the city name to Florence. Florence has Sean´s favorite cathedral in Europe, the Duomo, so I´ve at least got to mention that building. One thing that seperates the Duomo from other cathedrals in Europe is that it´s in a class of it´s own in Florence. If you look at the city of Florence from a hill it´s very flat except for the Duomo which towers over everything else and sticks out like a sore thumb. So while the Duomo may not be in itself the most amazing cathedral (although it´s close), relative to the surrounding city it becomes even more magnificent. The area surrounding the city, Tuscany, is one of the nicest countrysides in Italy. We have had some of our best train rides since leaving Vienna the last time. Also, for those of you that didn´t know, Sean studied in Florence for a semester during college, so he knows the city very well. He gave me a walking tour of the city, which comprised more of which of his roommates like which bar rather than the history of the buildings. Which is fine by me because I needed a break from history lessons, this is a vacation. The biggest advantage of Sean living here before is that he knew some of the places more hidden from the main tourist paths. For example, one night we went on top of one of the hills surrounding the town which has a big plaza where a lot of the locals were and we had a great view of the city and the sunset. As many of you probably know, Florence was one of the centers of the Rennaisance, and thus it has some of the best art in Europe. However, the museums are very expensive so we were not able to go to them. So we didn´t quite get the entire Florence experience since we skipped most of the art, but hopefully I´ll have a chance to come back when I have more time and money because I´d really like to see Florence´s museums. On the flip side, one thing I didn´t like about Florence is that I heard more English than Italian. The place is absolutely covered in Americans, needless to say, we didn´t help the ratio. But walking down the streets you almost hear more English than Italian, which takes away from the authenticity but Florence is touristy for a reason, that being that Florence is definitely a must visit in Italy.