After a long day of travel, we finally made it to Florence, just in time for all the food places to be closed (it also happened to be Assumption Day) after a very light lunch of vending machine BBQ chips and Gatorade, we went to the Academia to see the famous David. The Academia is a very small gallery with David being the main attraction, but also a huge collection of brilliantly bright altarpieces. We snapped some pictures of the Duomo and the Bell Tower and decided to treat ourselves to a Florentine-style T-Bone steak dinner and you guessed it- another cheese board! Our hotel was The Student Hotel just down the street from the train station. Although this place had an amazing rooftop view with a pool, its hipster, too-cool for school vibe kind of turned us off- we preferred the quaint guest houses run by the locals. The following day we spent mostly inside of museums since Florence has so many of them! We started by walking up the claustrophobic- nightmare stairs into Brunelleschi's Duomo. Thank goodness we were first to go up because I can't imagine being stuffed in those stairwells with people also going down the opposite direction. We also climbed the Bell Tower because what else do you do after two whole days of hiking in the cliffs? After we caught our breath, we decided to check out the Bargello for Donatello's lesser-known David. We had tickets to the Uffizi Gallery in the afternoon and a chunk of time to kill before our time slot. I opted for the Galileo Museum which did not disappoint. It contains not only a collection of Renaissance-era scientific tools and machines, but also some of Leonardo Da Vinci's books filled with hand written notes and sketches as well as Galileo Galilei's actual middle finger under a glass dome. By the time we went into the Uffizi Gallery we were both a little museumed-out, but we pushed through. Although we needed to endure mobs of tour groups to glimpse Botticelli's Birth of Venus, and Titian's more brazen-seductive Venus of Urbino, I was pleasantly surprised to see Artemesia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holorfenes around a more quiet corner. Gentileschi was a rare female Renaissance artist and her violent rendition of the myth of Judith is much more powerful than versions by her more famous male counterparts- possibly because she was a rape survivor and her anger and triumph shows through her work. Before our long walk back to our hotel over the beautiful Ponte Vecchio we stopped at a small wine shop/restaurant overlooking the river. Later on that night we ate a big meal with fried dough balls as an appetizer. After being completely stuffed, the cook kept handing us shots of Limoncello! The next day we had an all day excursion planned to different Tuscan villages, Siena, San Gimignano, and Pisa with a traditional Tuscan wine lunch at a local farm. Although it was nice to finally have someone else take the wheel and bring us around different places, the two of us realized that group tours are really not our style. Preferring to explore on our own and walk at our own pace (which is fast) we found ourselves trying to disassociate from the large embarrassing tour group whenever the guide would stop in the middle of a busy street to explain the history of something. Our first stop was Siena where the annual horse race called the Palio is held in the sandy square. We arrived the very day after the race, so flags of the winning horse's village were hung around necks and from windows everywhere. Our next stop was a vineyard tour at the farm that would be serving us lunch. The Tuscan countryside was simply beautiful, especially under the crisp blue sky. We sat at a long communal table and shared bottles of wine and ate bread, pasta and pecorino cheese. We bought some lemon balsamic glaze to use at home and we enjoyed the last beautiful view of Tuscany from atop the hill. We could just barely make out the violet silhouettes in the distance of the medieval towers of San Gimignano. Once inside the village we made a beeline for the Medieval Torture Museum where we saw some very gruesome wax reenactments of the horrible things people were subjected to in the dark ages. I wish we had more time to explore San Gimignano, but because we needed to get back to the bus to head to Pisa, we were only able to walk up the center street and back. By the time we made it to Pisa the sun was beginning to sink lower in the sky, casting an amber glow across the bright white marble of the leaning tower and the surrounding buildings. As it was late and dark by the time we finally reached Florence again, we were both hungry and didn't care enough to research another restaurant, so we stopped at the first pizza place we found and had some ok pizza. (Even bad pizza in Italy is better than good pizza back home). We called it an early night so we could wake up and catch the train to Venice in the morning.
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AuthorI believe that travel is essential to exist in this world and that it is the perfect medicine for staleness. Archives
August 2022
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