The Best of Italy Tour 2016

Every other year, Shaler Area High School offers trips to international countries in order to further educate students on different cultures and offer opportunities for language students to practice what they have learned during their high school career. When it was announced that Shaler would be sponsoring a trip to Italy, even though Italian is not a class offered at Shaler, my friends and I jumped at the opportunity to go to the ancient cities that Italy has to offer.

Florence

The start of our tour began with us walking the solid block it took to get to the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore which has the red dome, Duomo di Firenze, that is easily recognized in the Florence landscape. From there we all quickly managed to grab some gelato and continue on our way to what our group described as iconic, golden turtle. This turtle, which is centered in the middle of the Piazza Della Signoria, looked like a cultural clash of modern art and the renaissance masterpieces surrounding it. The turtle is a visual keepsake of the the Medici family's famous Latin motto, "hurry slowly", which in return now translates in present day, "slow and steady wins the race".

From there we traveled to our first meal, the traditional tourist cliché pizza dinner, where we had our first culture shock of the trip: there is no ice in Italy. This was quite the surprise, especially since our first day was near 100℉! After an exquisite pizza dinner we retraced our steps through the "turtle square" and head back to our hotel for an early night.

The next morning consisted of a leather making display and shopping opportunity. This is where a majority of the group happily spent a large chunk of money on Florence leather goods. This of course lead to my group of friends getting lost in the middle of Florence and resulting in us sprinting through the streets in order to make it to the Piazza Della Signoria in time for our guided tour of the city.

On our guided tour we had an in depth description of what it was that we were actually seeing. We were also given great ideas on how to spend our free time for later. We initially walked through the outside entrance way to the Uffizi Gallery which was founded by the Medici Family. From there we walked along side the Arno River and then proceeded to head over to Ponte Vecchio, which is a medieval stone bridge that holds many art galleries across the Arno River. It's also home to many upscale shops.

From Ponte Vecchio, we looped back around to the Florence's political centers and walked through all of the shops and Piazza before we headed back into the Duomo. The Duomo actually consists of two domes, the inside facing dome and the outside dome. The inside dome is home to Giorgio Vasari's painting, The Last Judgement, which depicts Heaven and Hell and Christ's final judgement of all mortals on Earth.

After our guided tour, some of our group headed over to Pisa.

Part 2: Pisa