I've just been in this country for almost a week. The places I've visited are Rome (together with Vatican city) and Florence (Firenze).

Firstly, I'm going to speak about Rome. This famous city is a great monument itself, although there are so many things to protect there's not enough money to do so, and consequently, a considerable amount of interesting places aren't very well preserved. Moreover, I have to say that it was such hot weather I couldn't enjoy all the places I was exploring and in addition, it is undoubtely quite a chaotic city (with lots of cars driving along roads without lanes, at a significantly high speed). What I did enjoy was all the monuments and museums I was able to visit (Colosseo, Musei Vaticani, The Roman Forum...). These are places where all the lessons we learnt at school about Roman history come to life and make you think how poweful that empire was.

After spending some days in Rome, I went to Florence. Despite being a very touristic city as well, I feel it's not the same thing at all. You can walk down the streets in this city without being worried about trafic, as most of the streets in the city centre are pedestrian walkways. So in comparison with Rome, this is definitely an important advantage that made me prefer this city to the Italian capital. Besides, its cuisine is far better, with tastier vegetables, spices and herbs that accompany all the dishes. As for the monuments, personally I found them much more impressive than the ones in Rome, but it's just due to my personal likes. Buildings such as Duomo, Santa María Novella or Baptisterio are amazing, very different from the ones I'm used to observing. And I can't forget to mention the "Palazzo Vechio", which has a great collection of works of art which represent surprising episodes of the astonishingly rich Classical Mythology (I had a wonderful time seeing all the pictures in the palace, even if I'm not keen on art at all). Finally, I want to mention the beautiful Mediterranean landscape I was able to see from the hill, which contains a very different type of forest (at least, I'm not used to seeing this sort of forest, but the Atlantic one) with species such as olive trees or holm oaks.

All in all, I want to say that Rome is a great city, but due to the weather, the touristic character and the noisy traffic, I didn't like it as much as I thought. However, I didn't exepct to love Firenze and I actually did, because I found the buildings much more appealing and due to the little traffic, the city is a lot quieter. If I had the chance to come back to this country, I'd like to visit Florence again, since I didn't like art very much and it eventually developed on me a little interest in it.