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| Breakfast in a ballroom |
Florence is a nice place to feel crook. My cold has been making things a little tough but the historical centre of town is so small that we haven’t had to walk far to see the sights, and its been easy to pop back to the hotel for a little R & R .
Breakfast this morning was delightful, the service is outstanding and you have to love a hotel that serves sparkling white wine on the breakfast buffet! I passed on the wine however, and enjoyed my fresh juice instead.
Today we wallowed in fabulous art, with our Firenze card we jumped ahead of the queue at the Uffizi gallery and wandered through the halls admiring works by Giotto, Botticelli , Michelangelo and Da Vinci. The queues to enter are the price paid for being able to enjoy the art in a relatively non-crowded space, they only allow a limited number inside at once.
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| Santa Croce |
At the Bargello museum the focus is on renaissance sculpture, it’s a lesser known gallery but the roll call of artists on display makes it well worth a visit. But possibly my favourite visit of the day was the huge Santa Croce church where many of those artists were laid to rest. Santa Croce for Italians is a little like Westminster Abbey for the English, as you walk through the church you find tomb after tomb of famous people, like Michelangelo, Galileo, Donatello and Rossini. There were some marvellous frescoes too but it’s sad to see that the frescoes have all been destroyed from ground level to about 2 metres up the walls – in the 1960s there was a terrible flood that devastated Florence and the damage to Santa Croce was significant
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| Shopping on the Ponte Vecchio |
You can’t visit Florence without a stroll over the famous Ponte Vecchio, the medieval bridge that is so precious the the Germans spared it when they bombed all the other bridges during WWIi. The bridge is lined with jewellery shops and watchmakers so it was the perfect spot for me to buy a couple of gold charms as mementos of our trip. We had done some comparison shopping at other stores in the town and I was surprised to find the best prices were on the bridge, I guess all the competition has its effect!
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| Lunch and people watching on the Piazza della Signoria |
People watching is always fun and we watched the crowds roll past as we sat on the Piazza della Signoria eating an enormous pizza and a salad. I thoroughly approve of the Italian custom of serving the salad undressed and providing a bottle of olive oil and balsamic vinegar for you to drizzle to your own taste. The pizzas are amazing, I’m not generally a fan of pizza but the only way to describe the ones I’ve had here is “juicy”! Somehow they manage to serve them with flavoursome , saucy toppings and maintain the crisp bases. Often just a few flavours but the combinations are wonderful.
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| The “Hall of 500” – Palazzo Vecchio |
Being unwell has slowed me down a bit so we only made one more stop after lunch before retreating to the hotel. The Palazzo Vecchio is a massive, fortress palace that was the town hall of the Medici. It’s centrepiece is the Colossal “Hall of Five Hundred” with an incredible ceiling and space for a football crowd!
I have to admit I also walked through looking for various nooks and crannies that featured in the latest Dan Brown novel “Inferno” . The view from some of the windows was spectacular, we could see the hardy people who had climbed the 400 steps to the top of the Duomo dome. They had more energy than me, my cold meant that a return to the hotel for a quiet evening was the next thing on the agenda. A quiet night to rest up and catch up on blogging!
