Florence

10/24/12

Boungiorno,

Yesterday was a day of doing laundry, investigating the best way to see Florence (or Firenze’ as it is really spelled and pronounced if you are Italian), and searching for internet access. It was a lot of work but we were finally successful at all three.

Today we took the bus to Florence. That was an adventure in itself. The buses are big and the streets are very narrow. There were several white knuckle moments. Anyway, the guide book said that you need at least 2 days to do Florence and that the lines for the main exhibits are pretty long, so we bought a two day pass that was good for all of the main museums and let us bypass the long lines. That was money well spent.

Florence is the museum mecca of the world I think. There is a museum on just about every street corner and many of them show much of the same thing and if you are into renaissance art you would be in heaven. We decided that it wasn’t in our top ten of “have to see more of” list, but it was interesting non-the-less. I did enjoy the sculptures and the architecture and found the walled cities fascinating see . Spending time wandering the streets gives you some perspective on a very different way of life.

We did see some of Michelangelo’s work and the statue of David is beautiful! Tom got a picture of it before we saw the signs that said “No cameras allowed” in about 5 different languages…ooops. Even the ceilings were beautiful . These are the grardens outside the National Museum I have to tell you, they were really into painting and sculpting naked people in the 12^th and 13^th centuries.

It was pretty cool eating lunch alfresco (outside) of a centuries old building and using WI FI to email. I also got to have my picture taken with Da Vinci or at least with a guy dressed as a statue of Da Vinci. He was really pretty remarkable and fun to watch as was the street artist doing a chalk drawing of the Mona Lisa in one of the piazzas.

We also found little unique shops like this little clock store very cool. We only hit the very tip of the 50+ museums, but it was enough to get the flavor of Florence.