On Saturday, my wife was asking me if I remembered the name of a hotel we stayed at in Florence when we visited there in 1997. I did not. But I remembered something about it being a monastery in the past. A Google map search did not help me find it. I remembered that we had to cross the river to get to the center of town and that the Ponte Vecchio was the next bridge in one direction.
I looked through my box of things that I kept from that year (we lived in Debrecen, Hungary for nine months). I came across this artistic card with the Duomo and figured that it must be it. I looked it up on Google Maps and it is where I expected it to be. It comes up on Google Maps as Foresteria Valdese di Firenze. And I found their website.
We stayed in Florence (Firenze) for a couple of days after spending Christmas in the Swiss Alps. The hotel was really nice. Much better than the accommodations we ended up with in Rome. I loved Firenze. Just walking around the streets was a visual feast as winding streets opened up to vistas of different landmarks.
My son’s girlfriend just got back from a trip to Italy and Florence was her favorite of the places they visited. That got my wife thinking about the time we spent in Italy which led to the question that led me down memory lane as I went through my box of mementos.