Florence cultural events

Buona giornata ragazzi! Sorry this is so late.

I can't even express to you how cultural of a city florence is. I just love it! I can walk down the street and see a painter, or a sidewalk artist drawing a Botticelli with pastels, or a violin player playing excerpts from Vivaldi or from famous operas. They embrace culture here, and they live it. They implement it in daily life, and they let it thrive out in the open for everyone to enjoy. It's not confined in just a museum or just a historical building. They put on events all the time, not just once a year. For example, I did three really cool city events in one day! Thursday April 30th. Things like this go on all the time, and since three somehow lined up all on the same day, I decided to do them all. I LOVE FLORENCE.

-The first cool thing I did was an annual artisan Festival at a place away from the city center called Fortezza da Basso. Literally translated means fort, and when you see it you can tell this is a really old fortification used for war and probably all sorts of other things, but now it is used for large conventions like this. A huge area of building after building, all filled with stuff. Some are food places, one huge area is dedicated to clothing makers and jewelry makers, another is all beauty products, another is all horticulture and plants, another is ceramic pieces, and one huge building in the center was like the world craft fair or something like that. I kid you not, this building is massive. Three floors that spans for ever and ever. I got lost on every single floor! The ground floor was all local italian artisans that produced everything you could possibly want ranging from knickknacks to flowers, to garments to food. The bottom level was the world artisan area- artisans from all over the world, and each section of this floor was separated by country!!!! Crazy! India, lots of countries in Africa indonesia, china, south america, spain, japan, korea, germany, just country after country with clothes, pottery, art, jewelry, just amazing beautiful things. And finally the top floor-- all food. Nothing but food. From any country you could think of! Again segmented by the specific country. So you had crepe makers near france, meats near germany, kebaps near Turkey, meats and cheeses I'd never even heard of, just everywhere. It was literally amazing. I would go back next year for that event.

-The second thing I did was go to a gelato festival up at piazzale michelangiolo. How cool is that??? I went with my roommates and it was awesome! Multiple gelato trucks! And for 7 euro you could get a ticket that got you 6 different kinds of gelato. Kind of large cups too! I think I only ate 5 heh heh. But there was all kinds of delicious flavors, I unfortunately don't remember specifically what kinds besides nutella which was delicious of course.

-My roommates and I also did a bookmaking workshop through school. That was so fun too! The class was taught by a local bookbinder, and they supplied everything for us. The paper, the awls, covers and thread. We got to design our own pattern we wanted on the spine, and then you punch all the holes in the pages, and thread! It was surprisingly simple. And fun :) we all got a really cool souvenir to take home.

-The last one was finally that night. Called Notte Bianca, which means white night. The city basically stays up until 4 am with live music everywhere, artists, restaurants open, shops open, and all sorts of stuff going on. They hand out program guides that are connected to a map, so that you can see what is going on where, at what time, and how to get there. There was about 50 events total! So many, it was nuts. My friend and I just walked around and happened to run into some random music groups (italian heavy metal?), jazz, rock, string violin quartet, and other cool things. We also found some cool street artists doing stuff. Very cool! We didn't want to stay out too late with just the two of us, or else we would have stayed later to see more events. But this was a really cool event :)

Ciao!