Florence Ice Cream Festival

Outside the Uffizi gallery stands Ahmed, a forty year old Moroccan who has lived and worked in Italy for 20 years. He paints miniature watercolors of the city’s vistas: the Duomo, the Boboli Gardens, the narrow winding backstreets, or the famous Ponte Vecchio. Down the road and over that same bridge, outside the Palazzo Pitti are several more street artists. An Iranian immigrant makes exquisite, lacquered oil paintings of similar scenes, but their format is so different you would hardly recognize them. Next to him is Victoria, an English-Sicilian, whose very modernist watercolors depict mostly rural Tuscan scenes which would not be out of place in a sleek urban kitchen anywhere in the world. These are the street artists of Florence, a historic world capital of art. But where they practice their art in the shadow of Boticelli and Michelangelo, their work is more on the level of mere mortals, and can be bought for a few measley bucks. Dilshad, a Kurd, has been in Italy since he was a teenager, and produces dark and brooding oil paintings of the city. “I have a lot to learn,” he says, staring at the façade of a church. “But I paint what I know.”

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Solve the problem of finding the best ice cream in Florence by visiting during the Firenze Gelato Festival, when the city turns itself into one giant ice cream shop. At official venues dotted around the city, you can savor the best traditional gelatos in Italy, and if that’s not enough, dozens of local gelaterias also participate in the event. Sample a variety of flavors ranging from chocolate, wild strawberry, blood orange, mango, lemon, and pistachio, to cheesecake, rice pudding, ricotta and fig, pear and parmesan, rose water, and white chocolate, and, the decidedly bizarre, rice with mushrooms. The festival also includes demonstrations, exhibitions, and other delicious educational activities.

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