A Week in Florence Visiting Our Daughter Who Was Studying Abroad

The Flight Over

The Flight Over

Flying business class to Europe is not something I take for granted. My wife and I settled into our seats on the overnight flight, toasted with orange juice, and I thought: this is not how I got to Florence the first time. In 1992 I was 21, backpacking through Europe on the cheap with a girlfriend the summer after college graduation. I slept on trains. I ate whatever was nearest and cheapest. I had no plan worth mentioning and that was entirely the point.

Thirty-plus years later I was heading back — this time to visit our daughter Julia, who had spent a semester studying abroad in Florence. The city had been waiting for me for a long time. I just hadn't known how the return would look.

Arriving Into Her World

Arriving Into Her World

There's something different about visiting a city when someone you love lives there. Florence wasn't just a destination we were ticking off. We were stepping into Julia's life for a week — the streets she walked every day, the coffee she had every morning, the view she'd been waking up to for months.

The AirBnb we rented had a rooftop terrace with a direct sightline to the Palazzo Vecchio. That was the whole reason we booked it. It delivered completely.

The best moment happened early in the week. Julia was wrapping up her final days with her study abroad program, and she invited a group of her study abroad friends over to our terrace for a happy hour before they all went to the program's formal closing dinner. A dozen or so of them arrived dressed for the occasion — and for an hour, Fred Again played on the speaker, prosecco got poured, and we sat there watching them laugh and chatter on a rooftop in Florence with the Palazzo Vecchio rising behind them.

"She had built an entire life here. These were her people."

Watching it happen in front of that skyline was the kind of moment you don't fully process until later. What does it mean to visit your child in a place they've genuinely made their own?

Florence After Dark

Florence After Dark

We walked at night as much as we could. Florence after dark is a different city than Florence at noon — quieter, warmer in tone, the stone streets lit by lanterns and the occasional neon sign glowing turquoise above a narrow alley. The crowds thin out. The architecture, freed from the daytime chaos, starts to feel like it belongs to you.

One night we stood in the Piazza della Signoria late enough that almost nobody else was there. The Palazzo Vecchio was floodlit. Neptune stood over his fountain. The scale of the place hit differently at night — less like a tourist attraction, more like something that had simply always existed and would keep existing long after we left.

Inside the Monuments

Inside the Monuments

Florence rewards patience. The Duomo, the Campanile, the Palazzo Vecchio — these are not places to rush. We went inside all of them, slowly, and each one gave us something the outside couldn't prepare us for.

Inside the Duomo, the dome stops you completely. Giorgio Vasari's Last Judgment fresco covers the entire ceiling — heaven and hell playing out across a space so vast that you have to keep turning to take it all in. The stained glass windows below glow in the late morning light. I stood there longer than I expected to. It's one of those rare interiors that makes you feel genuinely small in a way that isn't unpleasant.

The Palazzo Vecchio was a revelation we almost missed. Most people walk past it and photograph the exterior. Go inside — specifically up to the gallery level above the Salone dei Cinquecento — and you'll find yourself looking down at one of the most extraordinary rooms in the world. Vasari painted the ceiling. The walls are covered in battle frescos. Two tiny people were walking around the floor below us, which gave the whole thing a scale that no photograph communicates properly.

Up on Top of the City — Visiting Giotto's Campanile With Your Study Abroad Student

Up on Top of the City — Visiting Giotto's Campanile With Your Study Abroad Student

Julia had been waiting to climb Giotto's Campanile until we arrived. It's one of the more expensive single attractions in Florence — timed entry, not cheap — and she didn't want to do it alone. She saved it for us.

The stairs are narrow stone, tightly wound, lit just enough to keep you moving. You pass through several levels before you reach the top. When you get there, the entire city is laid out in every direction — red rooftops as far as you can see, the Duomo close enough to touch, the hills of Tuscany beyond the city limits. My wife stood at the edge and tipped her head back to look at the bell tower rising above her. She'd been doing that a lot this week — tilting her head back at things too large to take in any other way. Florence has that effect.

There are 414 steps. Every single one is worth it.

Eating Like You Live Here

Eating Like You Live Here

Julia had one non-negotiable for our trip: a panino from 'Ino, her absolute favorite spot in the city. It's on Via dei Georgofili, tucked between the Uffizi and Ponte Vecchio in the kind of narrow alley that Florence does better than anywhere — the kind you'd walk past without noticing if nobody told you to look. Owner Alessandro Frassica has turned it into something of a quiet institution: covered by the New York Times, featured on Italian MasterChef, doing pop-ups in Sydney and Los Angeles while still keeping the original shop open only from noon to three every afternoon.

We each ordered something different, held our sandwiches up in a toast over San Pellegrino bottles, and ate standing at the counter. The schiacciata — Tuscany's crispy, tender flatbread — held everything together, literally and otherwise. It was the best meal of the trip, and it cost almost nothing.

Florence does this constantly. The best things are often the cheapest, and the places that know it don't need to tell you.

The River and the Light

The River and the Light

The Arno is not a dramatic river. It's wide and calm and green and it runs through the middle of the city the way a river should — quietly, as though it has seen everything and isn't easily impressed. Standing on a bridge and looking toward Ponte Vecchio, you understand why people have been painting this view for five hundred years. The light on the buildings along the embankment is something a camera only partially catches.

We walked along the river in the afternoons when we weren't climbing things. Florence is a deeply walkable city — you can cross most of it on foot in twenty minutes and spend the rest of the day wandering the neighborhoods between the major landmarks. The piazzas fill up and empty out with a rhythm that starts to feel natural after a few days.

Standing in Front of Michelangelo's David

Standing in Front of Michelangelo's David

I had stood in front of Michelangelo's David once before — in 1992, during that post-graduation backpacking trip, in this same city, in this same building. I was 21. I didn't know what I was looking at, not really. I stood there for a few minutes, took a photo with a disposable camera, and moved on.

I was not 21 this time.

Standing there again, flanked by my wife and my daughter, I felt something I wasn't entirely prepared for. It wasn't nostalgia exactly — it was more like gratitude. Gratitude for the thirty-plus years between those two visits. For the fact that the life I had lived in the gap had brought me back to the same spot with two of my favorite people on earth. David hadn't changed. The room was still packed. The statue was still bigger than you expect.

I had changed. That was the whole thing.

What do you see in a work of art the second time around that you couldn't have seen the first?

The View From the Hill

The View From the Hill

On our last evening we climbed to Piazzale Michelangelo at dusk. the whole city went gold below us — the Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio's tower, the Arno catching the last of the light. Storm clouds had been building all afternoon and gave the sunset a dramatic edge it might not otherwise have had. We stood there for a long time without saying much.

I don't take trips like this for granted. The ability to fly overnight, rent a terrace in the heart of Florence, climb things and eat well and stay as long as we needed — I know that's not available to everyone, and I felt the weight of that gratitude standing on that hill. But the deeper gift wasn't the trip itself. It was getting to witness a slice of what Julia's semester had actually been — the city she'd learned to navigate, the friendships she'd built, the version of herself she'd become while she was away from us. A group of her friends dressed for a formal dinner on our rooftop, Fred Again on the speaker, prosecco in hand, Palazzo Vecchio in the background. That hour alone was worth the flight.

Julia wasn't flying home with us. She had one more week in Florence, and then a month of solo backpacking across Europe — her own adventure, entirely on her terms, before meeting us in Athens on the other side of it. We were the ones leaving. She was staying.

Standing on that hill, watching the city go gold, I understood that what we'd witnessed that week wasn't an ending at all. It was a glimpse into a life already well underway — a semester that had changed her in ways we were only beginning to see, built on friendships that would outlast the program, in a city she now knew from the inside. We got a week of it. She got the whole thing.

That's not a small gift. That's an enormous one.