The train ride from Rome to Florence was a short one – maybe an hour or hour and a half. After getting off at the wrong train station and being lost without a map in Florence for a while, we got directions to the correct train stop we were supposed to get off at and then found our hostel. By the time we’d reached the hostel and unloaded our bags, it was about 19:00.

Florence, capital of Tuscany, is an amazingly beautiful city of about 956,000 set on the Arno River and at the foot of the Apennines Mountains. It’s highly reguarded as the main Renaissance city and was once the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. As we walked across a bridge over the Arno River and to a gellato shop, we admired the beauty of the bridges and the skyline with the mountains and a setting sun in the background. I had heard several people rave about the gellato in Italy and in retrospect, Florence is the gellato capital of the world as far as I’m concerned. Gellato is a sort of ice cream-yogurt type mix and is to Europeans what ice cream is to Americans – it’s even often served in cones. I got some sort of cake-flavored gellato and it was one of the most delicious things I’ve ever had. That is, until I tried caramel creme later that night (I’m a caramel fiend, so I was a bit biased). Anyway, we walked around the city and admired its beauty at night while enjoying a bottle of wine and sitting along the river and then packed it in for the night.