This photo was taken last year, on our school’s Music Tour to Tuscany. Here you can see me, Vicky (Pizza Express Girl) and Emma, standing on the Pontevecchio, which is a long famous bridge over the river in Florence, with loads of (very expensive) tiny shops on it.
Our trip around Tuscany was amazing, one of the best weeks of my life. It was constantly hot, apart from that day we went to Florence, when it absolutely poured with rain, quite unexpectedly. As my singing teacher said, “when it rains in Florence, it really rains.” It started out with only a few large drops now and then, beginning when our coaches were pulling up on one of the back streets near the famous cathedral. We all go out, but it wasn’t bad enough for those of us who had brought umbrellas – about three out of over fifty people – to put them up. We began making our way along the tiny streets toward the square in front of the cathedral. The drops of rain began falling more regularly, though we didn’t notice it so much due to the overhanging roofs high above us, and the tiny pavements, meaning we were walking in single file under the shelter of them. It began raining harder once we reached the square, and we all tried to squeeze under the teacher’s umbrellas while struggling to hear our instructions on when and where to meet up again for our tours around the Uffizi gallery after lunch, under the growing rumbles of thunder. It was hard to keep our balance on the marble smooth steps to the cathedral, and more than one person slipped over.
Finally we were let loose, and almost at that moment it began raining harder than I’ve ever experienced before. Completely without any idea of where we wanted to go, and trying to get out of the tipping rain, my friends and I legged it across the square to shelter under some awnings of shops. At that point, I was as wet as I would usually get in England, while walking for half an hour in the rain. I wasn’t expecting to get wetter. From there, we tried to make sense of the photocopied map we’d been given, and decided to try and find a pizza place on the way to the Uffizi. However, what the people reading the map lacked was a sense of direction, and at that point I was busy videoing the torrential rain, which in the past five minutes had caused the roads to become rivers, and the drains to become overflowing fountains. You can see the clips in the video below.
We tried running down one road, passing the teachers all huddled under a tiny cafe awning. However, by the time we’d realised that 1) this road had no shops with awnings to hide under, and 2) this was not the way we were supposed to be going, we were all absolutely drenched. There was no dry part of our bodies, we may as well have jumped in a swimming pool fully clothed. The street sellers who had been following us around offering us umbrellas to buy still had the audacity to ask us at this point if we wanted to buy one, until I yelled at him “look at me – do I look like I want one now?”. It was in English, but I think they all got the point.
Finally we found the right direction, and spotted a restaurant for us to have lunch, in between me losing my shoe in the middle of the road, and resigning myself that I could not get wetter, so may as well walk instead of run through the rain. Once we arrived, we took turns stripping off in the loo , wringing our clothes out in the basin and trying to try them with paper towels. That was an uncomfortable lunch, sitting in wet clothes.
Thankfully by the time we left it had stopped raining, and began to get rather warm. By the time we took that photo, on the way to the Uffizi (I think), I was almost dry, and after a while we all were completely dry. Vicky insisted on buying that blue top to wear instead of her wet one though, and my jeans have never really been the same since.
Tags: friends, italy, Music, music tour, school, story, summer