The Search for Lily Myers ✓

48 | On Top of the World, Pt. II

After they had finished their espressos and pastries—and Amelia had learned how Nutella was born from a cocoa shortage after World War II—everyone was eager to set off towards the city center despite how cozy and all-around wonderful the little cafe was.

The warm coffee in her stomach made the chill in the air a little less brutal when they stepped back outside. Amelia couldn't help but notice how utterly calm everything around them seemed to be. There were only a handful of other people crossing the bridge. Even the river beneath them was still, as if the whole city was holding its breath just for her, so that she could feel like she had all the time in the world to take it all in.

Across the bridge, they almost immediately arrived upon their first popular tourist spot of the day, the Piazza della Signoria. It was a large, open square in front of the town hall of Florence, which Amelia was told was a famous monument in and of itself. Its tower was the only piece of architecture in the city that came anywhere close to rivaling the height of the cathedral, but as her eyes floated around the square and all the beautiful statues that called it home and she listened to Robert point out what everything was, she realized that the adjacent courtyard she was staring at was actually something she was much more interested in: the center of one the most famous art galleries in the world. The Uffizi Gallery was one of those that she had heard about over and over and over again in her art history studies and she had a growing feeling that she was probably going to be inadvertently stumbling straight into important historical landmarks for this entire trip.

This was so different from home, from anything that she'd ever known. A city that had seen its artistic and economic peak just as the very first European colonizers were even making their way over to North America. She had only been here for a couple of hours and yet could already feel how the collective consciousness of the city—all of the people who had ever walked its streets, all of the trillions of little fragments of stories and memories and objects that when drawn together represented this place's legacy—felt like its own living, breathing thing that existed separate from any one person or location or idea, that continued to thrive even today.

Only once they had meandered around the perimeter of the square to look at all of the sculptures did they move on toward the cathedral. The streets of Florence were a curious amalgamation of old architecture and sleek luxury stores sprinkled in for the tastes of those who had come here from all over the world for a taste of Italian fashion.

Their pace slowed as they entered the piazza where the cathedral was. Amelia didn't think that her breath had ever been taken away by a building, but it was impressive in a way that contemporary architecture simply wasn't. This was tons upon tons of elaborately decorated marble and brick—hundreds of years' worth of labor and architectural innovation. As her gaze moved up to the dome, it surprised her to see that there were people on top of it.

"You can go up there?" she ogled, the question directed towards no one in particular since the answer was right there in front of her.

But the person who happened to be closest to her was, of course, Henry. He pointed towards a short line of people queued up near one of the side entrances to the cathedral.

"Have you ever done it?" she asked.

"Once, when I was a little kid." A nostalgic expression slipped onto his face as he glanced over toward Lily. "You were there, too, you just probably would have been too young to remember it."

"I'm vaguely remembering being terrified," she told him. "I'm sure you made fun of me for it."

"Of course I did."

Eagerly, Amelia questioned, "Can we go up there?"

Their entire group was listening in to the conversation at this point; Jen chimed in to say that she remembered seeing somewhere that the tickets could be bought online. One quick Google search later, they discovered that there were still some tickets available for half an hour from now—probably because it surely felt like Dante's Ninth Circle of Hell up there this morning.