Italy Trip Part 1: Florence & Tuscany

Hi loves! Finally getting a chance to sit down and write about our 12 day trip to Italy.  I’m going to break these posts up into different parts just because doing it all in one would be probably the longest blog post ever. Ha!  So in this one, I’ll do our Italy Trip Part 1: Florence, Tuscany, and then in later posts I will cover Rome and the Amalfi Coast with Capri, Positano, & Ravello.  We also were in Naples as a “home-base”…our sweet friends are in the Navy and they’re stationed there, so we were able to visit them and interweave that with our other explorations.  So I’ll touch on Naples, Pompeii, and a fun day boating to the island of Ischia as well.  My sweet husband put together an amazing Excel Spreadsheet that I will share that details everything down to transportation between all the spots!

I’d love to say we had a direct flight from Charlotte to Naples, Italy, but that’s not a thing.  Lol.  I’d also love to tell you that we just had one layover in Rome.  But I was planning to use my credit card points to pay for the flight (I’d been stocking up so I had plenty) but all the flights from America to Naples were connected through JFK.  An excited & wine-induced flight selection process landed (no pun intended) us with a round trip flight from JFK-Naples, and then we had to get additional flights from Charlotte to JFK.  It wasn’t terrible, but definitely wasn’t the most efficient travel process.  It was pretty cheap, though 😉  I will say our experience on Alitalia (the flights were operated by Alitalia to Italy) was excellent.  It was a very comfortable flight, we had personal TVs… I watched 4 full movies on the way there and back including Justice League, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, The Greatest Showman, and Inception.  I had also brought my laptop and downloaded the full season 3 of New Girl so we watched plenty of those as well.  No I didn’t sleep.  More on that later.  Alitalia gives each passenger a blanket and neck pillow and they served full dinner towards the beginning of the flight there (since it was a red eye) and then breakfast towards the end.  Most people slept but I was awake through the red eye.  I thank the kind a-hole in front of me for reclining their seat so far back they were basically sitting in my lap.  We should have shared an airfare they were so close.  On principle I won’t recline my seat and I don’t think any seats should be able to recline.  It allows for the comfort of one passenger at the expense of another and I’m against it.  Anyways I digress.  The rest of the flight was really enjoyable and on the way back the person in front of me did not recline 🙂

Anyways, I think the strategy to beat jet lag is to just power through staying awake and then going to bed at night wherever you’re going.

So after we were awake for well over 24 hours, we landed in Naples around 11am.  Our friends picked us up in their cute little Alfa Romero hatchback (so Italian of them!) and we went back to their apartment, had some champagne, rose, meat & cheese for lunch, then explored around Naples that afternoon, including this castle and these views.

We grabbed gelato at one stop, grabbed an Aperol spritz at another stop, and on our last stop before making our way back to their place was for dinner.  Pizza 🙂  and more wine of course.  This will be a theme of the trip…sorry not sorry!  So by 9pm, Craig and I hadn’t slept for something like a day and a half so we passed right out.

FLORENCE

The next day we were up to catch a train to Florence! We took the Italo bullet train from Naples to Florence, and it was a little over a 2 hour ride.  Very smooth, the train has WiFi, and they serve you beverages and a little snack.

When we got to Florence, it wasn’t quite time to check into our AirBnB yet, but the host had arranged for us to be able to pick up the keys and store our bags at a Keesy location which was really convenient so we didn’t have to lug our bags around!

From there we went to this huge market in Florence and grabbed lunch.  I had grilled calamari & tuna tartare, and a glass of white wine! It was a warm day and the cold, crisp wine was so good.  After lunch we walked around more, and went and saw the Statue of David.  I honestly was so impressed by it.  It’s a huge statue and so impressive that Michelangelo did it when it was only 26 years old, from a single block of marble.  It’s 17 feet tall in case you’re wondering.  PS- We had one day in Florence so we sort of just tried to weight our options of what to see based on what time we had.

More walking around after that, and then found a cute little spot for a quick little appetizer & bottle of rose for an afternoon snack, followed by a walk to another spot for an Aperol spritz.  We sure did drink a lot this trip but we also walked over 20k steps every day so it all balanced out 😉

Later that afternoon we finally checked into our AirBnB before dinner.  Craig & I passed out for about 30 minutes.  Nap & rally!  Dinner we went to a recommendation given to me by a friend, called Acqua al 2.  It was so good!  We split two bottles of wine between the four of us, a white to start and then a red with dinner.  We shared the pasta sampler plate and then each couple shared the steak sampler.  It had a blueberry glazed Florentine steak as well as a balsamic glazed one…which might have been my favorite meal of the whole trip. SO GOOD.  And then we split the dessert sampler, obviously.  Samplers all day!! Haha.

After dinner I realized that my throat was hurting.  I tried to ignore it, but sure enough it was the start of a cold that I had for the next 6 days (sad) and that Craig caught after me.  I think it was the person that sat in my lap on the flight to Rome…they were sneezing the whole time.  Womp Womp.  But I was not going to let a cold get in the way of my fun.

There is so much of Florence we had to leave unseen, but when you’re trying to fit as much of one country into less than two weeks, you’ve gotta kind be all over the place.  The next morning we got in our little rental car and headed up to Tuscany!

TUSCANY

(You can find my dress here)

Again, a huge area that we did not have enough time to spend many days in (although if we go back, that is definitely what I’ll do!) and we went to Capezzana Estate Winery and also stayed in their recently renovated accommodations, which is in this old beautiful building in the village.  The rooms are beautiful, big bathrooms, quiet area, but be advised if you go in the summer… no AC 😉  Or if they had it, it wasn’t yet turned on for us and no internal controls.  We just slept with the windows open.

We did a wine tasting that day and they gave such generous pours of wine, we sat outside and tried all the wine they had before we got ready for dinner.  We ate dinner on the patio overlooking this incredible view!

Breakfast was also one of my favorite meals, and for sure the best croissant I ate the entire trip (and I ate a LOT of croissants).  You better believed I slathered Nutella all over that bad boy.

After breakfast we checked out and headed back to Florence to return the rental car and get back on the train.  Craig and I were heading to our next stop and would be getting off the train in Rome, while our friends headed back to Naples so they could go back to work for the week.

The next post will cover our 2 days in Rome! Stay tuned!

xo,

Bess