Giotto's Campanile, Florence, Italy
Yvonne & Dan @ Tuscan cooking class in Mercato Centrale Firenze
As part of the wedding, Ben organized group runs in the morning. So Dan woke up early Friday morning to join the group for a 4 mile running tour of Florence. This morning there were only three of us on the run but we had a great time. We ran along the Arno River where our guide took us to a somewhat hidden running track in the hills below Piazza Michelangelo. After the run Dan and Ben caught up over coffee. In the afternoon Yvonne and Dan signed up for a Tuscan cooking class (another activity offered by the wedding). We walked over to Mercato Centrale Firenze which has a ground floor of fresh fruit, vegetables, meats, fish, and cheese, and a second floor of prepared foods. On there second floor there is also a cooking studio where we took the class, Lorenzo De' Medici. At the start of the class they gave us a tour of the market. Everything cooked in the market comes from the vendors who bring fresh foods to the market, our cooking class is no exception. After the tour we began the class. We made pasta and a simple sauce with vegetables. The class was super fun, we met some more people from the wedding, and got to enjoy a very fresh, handmade meal.
Yvonne & Dan in Piazza Della Passera
After the class we walked around Florence some more and then head home to get ready for the first official event of the weekend, a friends and family dinner at Il Santo Spirito and then a larger party in a nearby piazza. The dinner was amazing, with some good speeches and an incredibly funny song by a couple of friends of Ben and Isabel. From dinner we moved down the street to meet up with a much larger portion of the wedding (dinner was only 50 or so people) where we found a few hundred guests eating and drinking in the square, Piazza Della Passera. This was super cool. All of the restaurants and cafes were open to us. So we all were able to enjoy the square and explore each restaurant on the square to try pizza, pasta, gellato, and coffee. We stayed here until about 2 in the morning meeting more friends and family for the wedding and watching various street performers that came by to play music and preform. Dan and Yvonne even participated in one of the performances with the bubble guy who by the end of his show was lighting bubbles filled with gas on fire. Dan & Yvonne each held one of these bubbles and watched it go up in flames in their hand. This also gave us time to catch up with our friends Labe and Norma who arrived in Florence just in time for the Friends and Family dinner.