italy trip: a day in cortona with seconds in florence!

today was a blur! we went out to cortona to see jess and she showed us her school and the town. what a difference from a tourist city like florence! we got there at about 9:30 this morning and went up a HUGE hill to her school...the people of cortona are probably all leg and butt models from all the hills they have to walk! her school is gorgeous, of course. it used to be a monastery so it's old stone work and cathedral ceilings - amazing!

after she showed us around the grounds we walked down the huge hill...not quite as bad as the way up, but the trip down does still cause a certain level of burn in the thighs ;) there was a market in the middle of the city so we walked through that and then around to some different shops. we got a delicioso cappuccino with a cinnamon star on top! after some more shopping...mostly window shopping...we got lunch at a place called mario's. hands down the best food we've eaten so far and probably will eat in rome! we got crostini with different toppings and then 2 pasta dishes to share. the pasta was all home made and it was pure heaven! we got spaghetti with oil, garlic and tomatoes and then tortellini fumo. fumo is this amazing cream sauce that has chili and bacon in it...maybe it sounds weird to you, but trust us - if you ever find yourself in cortona, go to mario's and get the FUMO!! you won't regret it.

after lunch we obviously got gelato :) jess took us to this famous place called cocoa. everything in their store is home made...including the scrumptious gelato! nick and i got the same flavors (except i got grande while he whimped out and got a small!) we got hazelnut and some kind of vanilla with chocolate muffin. jess got the dark chocolate and tiramisu. we went back in after we were done and made some purchases - i got what amounts to a homemade nutella and i can't wait to try it! nick got a lovely looking cookie sampler that is supposed to be a gift...though i did try my best to convince him that we should probably eat said cookies on the train ride home. it didn't work :(

after gelato jess took us on a walk through the residential area of the city. nick and i decided that we would buy a house there before we buy one in america! it's unbelievably beautiful - in fact, it's so pretty that it was chosen as the setting for Under the Tuscan Sun. so those of you who have seen that movie, you know what i'm talking about ;)

after that we pretty much said bye to jess and headed back to florence. it was dinner time (because we obviously hadn't eaten enough yet today) so we asked our hotel person for a recommendation for dinner. we found the place he recommended and decided to do a true italian style dinner - 4 courses! we started with the house white wine, moved on to bruschetta and bread with oil. i got ravioli with spinach and cheese filling while nick enjoyed tortellini with prosciutto and alfredo sauce. then we decided to go big and split a secondi of veal steak in a red wine sauce (sorry hannah!) and patita frittes (FRENCH FRIES!). nick thoroughly enjoyed the veal ( i just had a few bites to try it) while i plowed the majority of the fries. they were especially delicious soaked in the red wine sauce. mmmmm. then obviously we had to shove dessert down our gullets, so we split a piece of "dolci di casa" - cake of the house, which was a chocolate torte type of thing with huge globs of chocolate sauce.

it was a ton of food, and even though we feel slightly ashamed of just how much we really ate today, we'll still share pics with you!