This weekend my friend Devon and I rode a bus to Greve, fifty minutes outside Florence and home of a huge wine tasting place.
It was amazing. You walk downstairs to this giant cavern type place with hundreds and hundreds of bottles lining the walls. When you get there you buy a card with 10, 20, or 25 euros and they give you a wine glass for the day. Then throughout the place there are these circular tables where you insert your card and then press a button above the wine you'd like to try, place your glass underneath and down it pours. The best part about it is most of the tastes were about 60 - 80 cents, for a good amount of wine! Devon and I brought our notebooks, and read through two wine books as we traveled through the stations, smelling and tasting all the wines and taking notes on what we'd tried. It was awesome. The whole day I ended up spending about 8 euro and tasted around 15 different wines... places like this just don't exist in the US. I should make one!
On the bus to and from Greve we passed vineyard after vineyard, it was beautiful! I learned that Tuscany, and the area around Florence is the Chianti region, and I'm opening my tastes up to red wine, which I used to hate. The process of how wine is made, the types of grapes, and the variety of flavors and descriptions is huge. Coming here has really given me a new found appreciate for the art of wine.
This was the first full weekend I've spent in Florence since I got here, so on Saturday I went on a solo adventure, exploring the city at my own pace. It was perfect and something I've been wanting to do for a long time. I took my time in the leather market, walked across the Ponte Vecchio, got gelato at my favorite place, explored the other side of the Arno, shopped but bought nothing, and ate a delicious margarita pizza all on my own. There is something so freeing about being by yourself in a new city. You can go and do whatever you'd like at your own pace.
Last night's sunset:
