What were you grateful for this week?
Books for the rainy days. 

What was the most challenging part of this week?
It’s been cold and rainy, so it was hard to get out and do stuff through the week. 

Tell us about a “wow” moment you had this week.
I helped my host child throw a birthday party for her baby doll while her parents went out. It was fun to do something different, and give her parents time to themselves. 

Tell us about your week! 
I’m so completely in love with Florence. I went there with a couple other Rome Abroad girls over the weekend and it was amazing. I’m so grateful I got the chance to go. Florence is a lot smaller than Rome, with everything close by. It’s clean and beautiful, how I’ve always imagined Italy to be. We saw the David (ahhhhh!) along with Michelangelo’s other Prisoner statues, went through the Duomo museum to see Ghiberti’s original Gates of Paradise, saw the baptistery Dante was baptized in, and climbed the Duomo itself the first day. We timed it to be up there at sunset and it was incredible, so worth it. It was a gorgeous view.

Florence is definitely a city of views. First we had the view from the dome, and we got a similar view the next day, climbing Giotto’s bell tower, where we could appreciate the duomo itself. Then we crossed the river to Piazzale Michelangelo, a hill where you can see all of Florence. Definitely worth the walk over, it was so pretty.

I also got to go through Uffizi Gallery and I absolutely adored that. It was honestly probably my favorite part of the trip. It has the largest collection of Renaissance and Baroque art in the world, along with a huge collection of ancient Roman and Greek statues. I saw masterpieces by Botticelli, Caravaggio, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, and Rembrandt, to name only a few. It was unreal to see some of these paintings and artworks in real life.