Florence is not only its famous historical centre, its monuments, its tourists, but all in all is a small city – you just walk some minutes more and find yourself out of the most celebrated streets, and then what the Florentine call “periferia”. Periferia is where most of us – directors, staff, instructors – are living, and every working day we come from periferia to centro in various styles. Personally, I take the bus and then walk, quite a lot of walking. In the next posts, I will show some of the views of the city that I get during my walks, early in the morning.

This was about seven in the morning approaching the “viali” some ten minutes walk from the railway station of Firenze Santa Maria Novella. A flock of starlings, quite common now in the Italian cities, where they roost in the night to commute to the country during the day.  As you can imagine, nice as they look, there are some problems with their dejections, so that in some places the authorities put loudspeaker imitating hawk screeches, to scare them…