We got to “sleep in” until 7am on Sunday as we were looking forward to spending the day in Florence. Our hotel had a breakfast buffet, which was decent, and we dined with our companions before taking the bus to downtown Florence to begin our day at the Gallery Academie which is famous for housing Michelangelo’s statue of David. When we arrived downtown, we met our tour guide for the day – a lady named Tina – who took us through the museum and the rest of Florence for the morning. The Gallery Academie is not housed in an impressive looking building, but it had a lot of renaissance art and many of Michelangelo’s sculptures. I took a picture of the David, which I wasn’t supposed to, but just an FYI, this post will be rated PG-13 because of a lot of nude men. We were a little rushed in our museum trip, so we didn’t get to admire much besides David and missed the second floor completely.
After the Gallery, we headed off to the Cathedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore which is an enormous church in the center of town. We couldn’t go in because they had mass on the Sunday, so we listened to our tour guide explain some of the history and as we were waiting outside the archbishop of Florence entered the church. We then continued down to the Palazzio Vecchio which is the seat of government for Tuscany and has been for 700 years. Outside there were many famous sculptures, including a replica of David, plus the real Hercules and Neptune sculptures. The original David used to sit in front of the palazzo but it was moved inside to keep it out of the weather. We kept going through town to the Uffizi – the famous museum and the oldest, modern museum in the world (as in a place where art was displayed but not made). We didn’t go inside but outside were small statues of many famous Italians included Michelangelo, Galileo, Amerigo Vespucci, Dante, etc. The Uffizi is situated along the river Arno, so we took a picture of the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge) which is interesting in that is has shops and apartments along the bridge. From there we went towards the Sante Croce church which houses the tombs of many leading Italians. We stopped in a shop where they told us how Italian gold (always 18k) and leather (from sheep and goats, not cows) is made. And that was the end of our tour – we were free to roam as we pleased from noon to 8pm. We were a long ways from the hotel, so we had to figure out for ourselves, how to get back.
We ate at a restaurant in the plaza outside the Sante Croce church – Becky had ravioli with spinach and I had roast beef carpaccio. We then went into the church and saw the tombs of Michelangelo, Dante and Galileo. After this we decided to head back to the sites we’d seen thus far to get a chance to spend more time at each of them – and we were looking for Becky’s favorite store, H&M, because we had noticed someone had a bag from there. We went back to the Sante Maria Cathedrale, but the line was so long to get in there (even though it was free and the line was moving) that we decided just to roam around the streets. We had a fun time stopping at some shops and markets and then finding our way to H&M, where I lost about 45 minutes of my life and most of my savings. After that (and a stop for Gelato) we headed across the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge) to the other side of the river. There were just as many people over there. We found a shop called Italian Appeal which Becky loved and a little supermarket, which always excites me because you can get Coke for more than half off what you pay at most places. We saw the Pitti Palace and turned around and headed back towards our hotel. We made the command decision to walk all the way back as we passed a taxi station – it turned out to be about a 35 minute walk. We made it to the hotel and passed out with exhaustion.
We finished the day with dinner at the Il Grifone right around the corner from our hotel (Hotel Grifone). We had pasta and salad, fries and a pork chop with a huge chunk of watermelon for desert. I’ve never had watermelon before as a desert – it was good watermelon though. We watched the movie “Million Dollar Baby” before we went to bed – it was a good movie (Becky really liked it).
Eric's space 