FLORENCE
Italy is a dream trip. Well, for other people but it was never my dream. I was of course down to go but I didn’t go into it expecting to be nearly as blown away as I was. I believe I was even quoted as saying beforehand something insufferable like “Italy isn’t, like, my aesthetic.”
What I meant by that but wasn’t clearly communicating is that Italy through the lens of a travel blog is not my vibe. I feel like that’s the story of a lot of places though, and the photos you mostly see are all what you’d expect to see and it’s like…ok, what about it? Now I’m just sounding bratty as I try to articulate this but - in Florence I did find a specific beauty in it that wasn’t captured on my Facebook acquaintences’ study abroad albums. Turns out, it’s a city where people actually live.
One of my favorite things I did in Florence was the Gucci Gardens Museum. Of course this isn’t in any way a garden, but the insanity of the Gucci aesthetic vision is everything I strive to achieve. One of the exhibits at the time of my visit was a mirrored room displaying various collections. Like, not fashion collections but actual collections just regular people have hoarded in their lifetimes. Cuckoo clocks, stuffed animals, wigs, taxidermy bugs, etc. I could have stayed in that room forever and I need my apartment to emulate its energy. I love how weird people are.
On the flight over when I couldn’t sleep or focus on a movie, I queued up the map feature and got busy creating specific editing presets on Lightroom to try to refine the vibe I was going for this trip. Ultimately I did make a couple that have weaved their way into my standard editing rotation. In my internal battle to find a way to force fit classically and undeniably beautiful buildings and streets to match my vision, I landed on the below.
To add to the file of things I shouldn’t hyper-focus on: store windows. I’ve always had a thing for store windows. There’s something about the curation and however it was put together to catch the eye of shoppers paired with whatever outside world the glass is reflecting that draws me over without fail, every single time. During my brief art school stint, I did a portfolio piece on store windows in various Chicago neighborhoods that remains some of my favorite work from that era. I’m realizing I may be more passionate about store window design than I am most things in my life? Help me.
Florence’s cool girl neighborhood across the river, Oltrarno, makes for my favorite kind of unplanned walking around. My favorite thing in the city in general was just cutting through alleys and seeing what was going on back there. These small thoroughfares pack quite the punch with little details to snoop around in everywhere you look.
While in Oltrarno, one of the things I wanted to check out was one of the last remaining wine windows, which were popular during the Plague as a safer way to hand off wine. While it wasn’t functional, it was cool to see and it’s a great spot for apertivo and gossip.
A lot of times Florence felt like a fake city, meaning that everything was too perfect and didn’t seem like people actually lived there. Here it felt more real.
