World Cup

i bet that was amazing. we didnt catch any sporting events while we were there. we did however visit fiesole. it is such a quaint little town. as close as it is to firenze, it seems a million miles away once you get there. my wife and i took an italian class before going. in firenze, most of the people we dealt with spoke fluent english (except for the lady who ran the hotel), but in fiesole the majority of the people either didnt speak any english or spoke very little, so it came in handy there.

the saddest thing i saw while we were there was a mcdonalds in what had to be at least a 1000 yrs old bldg. [:@]

the scariest thing was a political rally outside the duomo. they were having some kind of meeting between the head of the political party and some other government officials inside the bell tower. anyways, there were hundreds of demonstrators outside the tower. the scary part was the fact that there were many carabinieri (sp?) there in full force with automatic rifles at the ready.  needless to say we crossed the river and visited the boboli gardens and the medici palace that day. []

the saddest thing i saw while we were there was a mcdonalds in what had to be at least a 1000 yrs old bldg.

 
Ahhh -that had to be heartbreaking! 
 
The match was great fun, very glad we went. I can well picture what you saw in the piazza that day was frightening - Italy is politically chaotic.  That passion comes to an ugly head sometimes.  Still, it seemed much less crazy that way then when I had been there in 1980.  I remember our tourbus being boarded by armed carabinieri twice at least to check all our papers and the cacophony of posters in the squares for many opposing political parties.  Also, we were in Paris a few weeks later and had very serious looking machine gun wielding police board our bus - we spoke no French and were unaware until a day or two later there had been an assasination attempt (son of the deposed Shah of Iran who was living in Paris). 
 
We wanted to make it up to Fiesole, but we were on a whirlwind schedule.  We did spend the better part of an afternoon walking the Boboli, though - the view from that top terrace was breathtaking - pastoral Tuscany in one direction and red tiled Florence in the other!

we spent about half a day in fiesole. we ate lunch in a little outdoor cafe overlooking firenze. there were some beautiful etruscan ruins there. we spent most of the time wandering through the ruins.

we only had a week there, so we decided to stay in firenze the whole time. we had thought we would have gotten in a couple of day trips to surrounding towns, but we didnt. i think i could easily spend a month or more just touring around the small towns and cities in the tuscany region.

I think you made a great and wise choice spending the week in Firenze.  It's the beating heart of the Italian Renaissance and then you have glorious, warm, quaint Tuscany surrounding.  It was my favorite when I was there as a kid and it's my favorite still.  It's where we envision ourselves living some day...
 
We, on the other hand, did a mad dash through the country, moving every two days.  Rome, Venice, Florence, Ischia (via Napoli), Conca dei Marini (near Amalfi) and back to Rome.  Some adventures planned, some impromptu.  We were trying to imagine watching the game today in each of those places...
 
 

we spent a week and still didnt get to see everything we wanted to.

i think when we go back, i want to go to rome. we will still probably only have a week. it is hard for me to get more than one week off at a time. so we may stay there the whole time. now that hartsfield int. has direct flights to rome, it is really appealing to me to try rome next . our other trip connected through paris. i have to say that airport sucked. plus it was cold there. we went in april, and it was NICE weather the whole time in italy 70-80 degrees and sunny all but the last day (rained about 1/2 the day then was nice out).