A Start, Tik-Tok, and a Tourism the Locals Like

I would like to start this blog with a preface. I lived in Florence for about 6 years– one year as a student and another 5 as a resident. Cosimo lived in Florence for a year when we met, left and then came back for another 3 years. As a study abroad student, I lived in a city where you could easily walk in the front doors of the Duomo (before the height of tourist season, acutally when there was a tourist season), during the Covid pandemic when you could not travel or even go further than 200 meters from your residence, the covid-y in between where you could go out and there were NO tourists, and the post-covid travel boom where the city was even more dominated by extreme mass tourism than before. Now in many wonderful cities around the world, very few “locals” live in historic city centers for a myriad of reasons– high rent, inadequate housing, and the unbelievably daunting task of walking throughout the city without being held up by a large tour group being some of the many.