A Quiet Afternoon in Florence

Look at my lovely little garden I get to sit in. I love it here.

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Thursday, December 5th

Today I have decided to spend my afternoon in the garden of my school. It is a quiet garden now, though when we first came, it was bustling with peers of mine sitting at every nook and cranny, soaking up the Florentine sun. Now, as the weather has begun to cool down and the sun has begun to set earlier, I am alone; I watch the sun set by myself, in solitude, as I sip on my school cafe’s americano. 

Every Tuesday and Thursday, I have about 2 or so hours in between my classes. In the earlier months, those hours were spent tucked away at the school, trudging away at some piece of work I had that had relatively nothing to do with academics: creating trip itineraries, buying plane tickets, calling my family, planning out the rest of my weekends. As I have finished up all of those busy activities, those hours have now been spent exploring the city I call home. My favorite way to do so is to find some sort of cafe or food establishment that I may sit at and have a meal before opening up my laptop and diving into real work; that is, all of the projects and assignments that continue to loom over my head as I write this entry. Oh, I also have a project due this Tuesday. I should get started on that actually…anyway. Today, however, I have decided to sit in the garden. 

My school is quite beautiful, and it makes me very grateful for the program that Syracuse has created. It is a small building tucked on a side of a rectangular piazza, the name of which comes from a Dominican friar that actually tried to take over the entirety of Florence around the time the Medici’s got kicked out and Machiavelli’s Prince was brewing. I do not particularly like the friar Savonarola, as apparently he was so obsessed with reforming Florence that he took away much of the beauty and pleasure that encapsulates the city. He even had a “bonfire of the vanities” in which he made influential artists destroy their artwork out of fear. Thankfully, Mr. fun-stealer was hanged in my favorite square here, and while this also led to the Medici’s coming back, at least Cellini and the rest of Florence’s artists got to work in peace once again.

Alas…

My school has lots of stairs, which are particularly humbling in the mornings when I have a class up on the third floor. Behind the main building stands a gated area, where there is a garden that supposedly tortoises roam in their free time - I have never seen these tortoises, though my friend Laura is particularly amused by them and makes an effort to find them daily. Maybe I should do that before I leave too. Anyway, the garden has this random palm tree tucked in the side, along with lots of chairs and desks where students can sit and work. My friend Owen enjoys reading here in between classes, whereas I only come to bathe in the sun. Now that it is colder, however, there is not that much sun and not that much warmth, much to my dismay. 

I am very lucky to have an area like this, and I wish that Syracuse in New York would have a common area such as this with lots of chairs and such to sit at. Though I am not sure it would be as used, as Syracuse has a much smaller window of warmth in comparison to Italy. I hear that it is snowing constantly there this week and usually averaging the 20s, whereas we only dip into the 50s here and occasionally the 40s (right now it is 52). I do have my sorority house now, however, which has a wonderful little porch that reminds me a bit of the tables we have here. 

The book that I am currently reading is Eat, Pray, Love. I am obsessed with it. Elizabeth Gilbert is my new hero as far as I am concerned. I also have found that on the days I struggle to get my reading in, she has an audiobook that she actually narrated on Spotify, and I get it for free with my premium subscription (which reminds me, when is Wrapped coming out? Ugh, I love Spotify. I also love that all of the other music streaming services actively try to be like Spotify, but we all know who’s on top!). The book is wonderful and deep and vulnerable and insightful and great for me, who is studying abroad just like her. I just finished traveling through India with Elizabeth, and now we are taking a flight to Indonesia. I wonder what will happen next!

I am beginning to count down the days that I have left in Florence, and as always I am becoming very sentimental and reflective of the time that I have left. So, I hope that I will crank out a few more blog posts related to my time here, as well as creating some travel blogs in the next few months. But for now, I sit and I write in this lovely garden.

My hands are freezing and the sun is beginning to set and I am not sure I can feel my toes anymore. So for now I am signing off. 2 weeks left here, how insane. 

Yours, 

Faith