Venice to Florence

19-21 October 2009

Found our accommodation in Florence with some effort, though turned out to be in a great position, central to everything. Went exploring almost immediately and came across the Orsanmichele museum less than a block away - a beautiful airy building that was once a granary, with just relatively few grand, dramatic sculptures to focus on.

From there to the Duomo and its intricate interior, including the magnificent dome for which the cathedral is famous (but is very hard to do justice in photographs...) Despite rumours of queues stretching hundreds of metres, there was no wait to climb up the winding staircase to the inside of the dome, just an arm's length from the frescoes, and then to the top of the Dome and up into the open air for a late afternoon view of Florence with the Tuscan hills in the backgound and church bells ringing all around.



Galleria dell'Accademia the next morning to see Michelangelo's David. The gallery was also showing the works of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and it was an intriguing combinaton of two artists, centuries apart, working in very different mediums.

We kept the Michelangelo theme in the afternoon, visiting the Medici Chapels which feature a number of his works, as well as an extraordinary if somewhat unsettling collection of reliquaries - various relics from an assortment of saints, usually fragments of bone from skull or limbs.

Rounded out the day with some shopping at the street markets, a wander over Pont Vecchio with its jewellery stores lining both sides, and dinner at a restaurant called Mamma Mia, which didn't disappoint at all.

Our plans for a day's bike riding seeing at least a little of Tuscany were disrupted by the first rainy day we've had since we arrived in Europe. Spent the morning at the Pitti Palace instead -room upon room of magnificent paintings and sculptures, fascinating and exhausting at the same time and requiring a good wood-fired pizza and a carafe of vino rosso to recover.

We just spent the afternoon wandering the streets, looking at the shops, fending off street sellers trying to sell us multitudes of umbrells, dodging the scooters and little electric cars, and choosing somewhere for dinner... nice low key afternoon.