Buon Natale!

Today is the first day where we don’t have anything specifically planned for us. As you might know, Italy is a very Catholic country. My expectation is most of the shops will be closed. So, what does a non-Catholic, American family do on Christmas in a foreign country? Well, for the majority of the Flatt’s, they sleep in and try to recover a bit from the fast pace of the trip so far. Even for us, there has been a bunch of stuff packed into a very short time. I did get a couple extra hours of sleep. I didn’t even set my alarm. Instead, I was awoken by the pipe organ and beautiful hymns sung by the choir in the Church that is adjacent to the hotel. I cracked the window just a bit to let the music in. Around 11am, the church services had ended, and I felt it was time to get everyone moving for the day. This is our last day in Florence, Italy after all.

We rolled out of the hotel and started to stroll down the narrow streets looking for a place to have some lunch. Shockingly, there were lots of restaurants open. Melissa selected a nearby place and we went in to have some food. It has been our experience that a quick meal in Italy is at least an hour long. It is very different than the fast-paced lunch breaks I am accustomed to in the US. where everything is done in 30 minutes.

When lunch was over, we went looking for the Fontana del Porcellino, a bronze fountain of a wild boar, on the Mercato Nuove. His snout is shiny and weathered, the result of the thousands of people who have rubbed it for luck. Legend has it that you will return to Florence when you do this. There was a very nice gentleman explaining how to rub the nose of the statue and then drop a coin into the small pool. He would then collect the coins the tourists dropped that did not fall through the grate. I am confident he was taking up the collection and was donating the proceeds to the poor (Melissa is concerned that people reading will think I wrote that in earnest. Joking!).

We took a quick turn around the statues from the previous day and then wandered around the city and in and out of the shops. We eventually made it to the central market. Even though most of the food places on the 2nd floor were open, the shops on the 1st floor were all closed. Still, we were able to do some shopping on our way back to the hotel. On our way we popped up to a roof top bar for a quick aperitivo before dinner. Melissa had a specific store she wanted to visit, then a quick stop at the hotel before dinner. Before we left on the trip, I really didn’t know if anything was going to be open for dinner on Christmas. I did some google-fu and found a place that looked interesting and made a reservation for the family at 7pm. I was shocked when it was so easy to get a 7pm dinner reservation. I had no idea at the time that Italians have dinner much later starting around 8:30.

After dinner we just had to have an after-dinner gelato. Back up in the room Santa visited each of the kids with a travel friendly Christmas gift. Then it was off to bed for a good night’s sleep to be ready for the next leg of our adventure… Lake Como!