White Night

Yesterday morning, I took my last final and officially finished my semester in Firenze. Then I tried really hard all day not to think about that.

Last night, to get my mind off things, I attended one of Firenze's wildest block parties. It was the second annual Notte Bianca, or "White Night" and the whole city was alive until early this morning.

Basically, White Night is an attempt to change Firenze's image from that of a "Renaissance postcard" to a young, vibrant, trendy city. The goal is to bring young Italians into Firenze from other areas of Italy in the hopes that they will stay here.

To do this, local shops, clubs, artists, and musicians teamed up to put on one whole-city party by and for Italians. Which meant we got an authentic glimpse of Italian culture without all the tourist traps.

And it was awesome.

As per our usual pre-party ritual, the CCI fam met at the six girls apartment to pre-game. An hour or so of CCI love and we were ready to take on the night.

The city was PACKED. As soon as we stepped out onto Ghibellina, we were sucked into a giant mass of loud, white-clad Italians sporting various light-up headgear. We elbowed our way through to Santa Croce, where men in white tuxedos were tangoing with women in white dresses. We watched this for a little while, then moved on to the Duomo, where we listened to several live bands.

By the time we decided to leave the Duomo, it was past 11, and the streets were more crowded than ever. We had to hold hands to keep from losing anyone as we picked our way through the mob to Piazza Signoria, where we danced to yet another live band.

We took a bathroom break at Cerchi around midnight, then tried to make our way back to the Duomo via back alleys and side streets, since people on Via Calzaiuoli (the main street running across town and right in front of the Duomo) were so tightly packed traffic was at a standstill.

This approach turned out not to be the best. We went way out of our way in an attempt to avoid the most crowded streets and got split into about five different groups in the process. I ended up with Bethany, Erika, Kevin, and the six girls back at the Duomo, but everyone else was nowhere to be found.

The main attraction at the Duomo was a band playing 70's and 80's American rock. They weren't very good, but they were energetic and the crowd was loving it, so we enjoyed ourselves anyway. Around 1:30, Caitlin, Jess, Kate, Brad, and Drew found us and we stayed listening to the cover band until their set ended.

Once again, we made the slow trip back to school and stopped in at "Meta Bar" (that's not really what it's called... it doesn't seem to have a name, so someone in the group called it after the grocery store across the street from it and the name stuck). Luckily for us, all but one of the missing groups had made it back to Meta Bar, so we were able to recollect and hang out there for a little while before it started raining.

We'd been sitting outside and, since there was really nowhere near by to take shelter, my apartment decided to call it a night. We said our good-byes and headed home, stopping for fantastic 3 a.m. kebabs on the way there.

So, you can probably tell it was a fun and crazy night. We failed in our mission of staying out until the city officially shut the party down (we needed to go three more hours), but we got a decent taste of what White Night is all about and we got to kick off our last week in style.