Florence: the sweetest things

The 48 hours following our return trip to Vermont included: overnight flight delays, sleeping, overflowing suitcases, napping, celebrating Drew's birthday, napping, eating, snuggling with the kiddos, napping, stocking our kitchen (enter: cured meats, cheeses, nutella, bread and olives), napping, mowing the lawn, a visit from the tooth fairy (reporting in for a double-header of a tooth loss), napping, making espressos, waking from napping and groggily realizing we had to go back to work. Basically in that order.

Yesterday, Drew told me he took a break from work to just look at the photos, and I couldn't blame him. Except I did because he has them all on his computer. I had none. So I began the process of transferring them. This is decidedly less fun than taking photos so I'm starting you off with the best antidote I can think of: a series of some of the sweetest things from Florence.

All you have to do is step outside and cafe doors open to the street with cases of incredible desserts. Row upon row.

 Many (arguably not all) streets in Florence smell amazing, in part because there are waffles being made. On the street. If it were up to me, this would happen far more often.

These popsicles were my favorite. I didn't have one, only because I already had a gelato in one hand and a camera in the other.

And then there's the gelato. Heaping piles of something you may know as icecream in a gazillion flavors, with cones galore exploding from case tops. Oh gelato.

Somehow we don't have a photo of the actual cases, which are literally these swirling lovely piles of flavors garnished with giant chunks of whatever flavor they are (melons, coffeebeans, coconut chunks, etc). Probably because there's no time to photograph when you're in the agonizing process of choosing a flavor. In any event, here's the first, and so certainly not the last, gelato of the trip:

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