APRIL 8 - 10, 2011
After a couple days of lounging in the sun and ambling through the alleyways along the Venice canal, we were ready to experience our first real Italian city: Florence, or Firenze to the Italians! So we checked out of our hostel and hopped the train to Florence on Friday morning. The train ran south for a couple hours through a beautiful green countryside, passing all those olive fields we saw from the plane and rushing through the sporadic tunnels of the mountain-rich landscape.
But enough about the train ride. Florence was AWESOME. As soon as you stepped off the train, you immediately knew you were in a much larger city. The sights, sounds, and smells of food (gelato shops were as abundant as Starbucks) were all over the place right out of the station.
And so here we go again with the pictures:
Firenze S. M. Novella train station
A neat church right outside the station
First look at the Duomo, but I'll get back to that later..
Street painters. All sorts of guys like this hanging around the attractions trying to get money from tourists. At least this one has some talent - lots of them just try and sell fake designer bags/sunglasses or useless toys.
After wandering around for a bit, we literally stumbled upon our hostel! It was literally an inconspicuous door leading into an apartment complex, though I guess these are really popular in Italy as they were everywhere.
Our room! It was actually really nice, definitely the best out of the three on our trip. Location was absolutely awesome, with the Duomo and Uffizi only 5 minutes away.
The view outside our window down into a cool little market. At night, musicians would set up in there and play right up into our window
Palazzo della Signoria
Between the wings of the Uffizi Gallery
First look at the Ponte Vecchio
The busy streets of Florence
Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Duomo. Beautiful building.
This place is MASSIVE.
The golden doors to the Florence Baptistery next to the Duomo
Inside the Duomo
The dome. So pretty
One of hundreds of cool buildings. And there are sculptures all over the place!
San Lorenzo Church, I think
Dude, you got a pigeon on your head.
The leather markets. Packed with people, and everyone is trying to sell you something. Apparently, Italian leather is amazing. Meh, as long as it holds my pants up, a belt is a belt.
I think this was when I was just wandering through the streets taking pictures of the city..
A neat church
View down the river. Great on such a beautiful day
No idea why there's a huge door here, but whatever works.
Randomly, a castle wall..?
Loving the mountains in the distance
Another view of the Ponte Vecchio
What a cool-looking bridge
At the Uffizi again
One of several fake 'David's - the real one is up in the Accademia, which I'll get to later!
'Perseus With The Head Of Medusa'
More statues at the Loggia dei Lanzi
These guys were awesome! A trio of musicians playing some great music all day
Love it!
Horse-drawn carriages everywhere. Oh, and those are the police with the funny hats. Gotta love foreign law enforcement.
Yay Florence!
SO MUCH MEAT. Love it. Makes me hungry just remembering passing this store
.. and SO MUCH CHOCOLATE.
OK, now might be a good time to go into the food. In short: it was awesome! Florence is considered to have some of the best food in Europe, and we were not let down. Delicious pasta, pizza, paninis (sandwiches), gelato, and TONS of ham-based foods were readily available everywhere you looked. I probably had at least one pasta-based dish everyday I was in Italy; multiple kinds of pasta, different kinds of sauces, added ingredients - it was all good. And the pizza was fantastic. Every pizza place had page upon page of different pizza combinations, and I didn't have a single bad one. My favorite might have been the 'Diavolo' at one restaurant: spicy sausage, hot peppers, and mushrooms on a cheesy and spicy pizza. And the crust was always amazing. To sum up - I ate very well in Florence, and Italy in general.
Plus, like I said before, there is gelato EVERYWHERE in Florence. Almost every street was home to at least four gelaterrias per block. Some of the ones crowded with tourists we tried to stay away from, but generally, you could get good authentic Italian gelato anywhere. My favorite one of those? Well, at my favorite Florence gelaterria, 'Festival del Gelato', I had an awesome combination of some black-as-night mousse-y chocolate stuff with some great caramel gelato. Awesome.
The Piazza della Repubblica at night!
Love this bell tower
On Saturday, we made a trip to the Uffizi Gallery, the biggest attraction in Florence and one of the largest art galleries in the world. If you didn't realize that before, you can just look at the line of about 500 people outside wrapping around the building waiting to get in. Before leaving, I read people have had to wait up to five hours beforehand, which I admit had me a bit worried. To skip the queue, we decided to reserve tickets on Friday for Saturday afternoon. Little did we know at the time - that would be one of the only museum expenditures of our entire trip! By some crazy coincidence, the random week that I chose for our trip just happened to coincide with Italy's 'Culture Week' - almost all of the major museums and attractions have free entry! It was nuts. Must have saved like $100 getting into everything for free. And here I thought we were somehow sneaking into the Uffizi and Accademia without paying..
The Uffizi was awesome: thousands of beautiful pieces of art, spanning multiple decades, all HUGE names in art and Italian history. Since photos weren't allowed, I had to sneak a couple pictures with my phone:
One of the huge hallways of sculpture
View from a balcony up on the Uffizi
Then we decided to hike up one of the hills to Michelangelo Plaza
The hike up the hill!
The awesome view from the top. Beautiful
The view of the plaza
A cool band (biker dude playing a banjo?!?! love it!) and a million photographers.
Florence at night
Camera was being a little buggy.. whoops.
Neat astrological sign thing on the sidewalk outside the Galileo Museum
Waiting in line (wrapping around the building) to get into the Accademia to see the real David!
Michelangelo's David! Over 14 feet tall and actually very impressive. Regardless of all the tourists, it was still pretty cool.
Near the Uffizi, a chain covered in padlocks with people initials on them. Cool idea!
Another shot form the top of the hill - we ended up going back since it was so pretty!
Basilica of Santa Croce
Then we stumbled onto a random park!
Football!
The arch was cool, but the random graffiti'd sign was pretty funny too
Can't count how many times I passed a building that looked as if it came right out of an old Spaghetti Western
Last night in Florence!
Our musical pals played the night off as we wandered around and breathed in the air of Florence on our final night. But I hope it wasn't the last time.
Florence was awesome. Where Venice was beautiful, Florence just had so much to offer: whether it was the thousands of pieces of art, the great food, or the wonderful people, it was just an all-around fun time.
But I was ready for the big time now: Rome. We'd done small and medium, but now we were moving towards a HUGE major city with an unbelievable amount of history. As we tucked in for the last night, all I could say was, 'Bring it on!'.
Good music for Florence:
Coconut Records - "Saint Jerome", off their album "Davy"
Couldn't get this song out of my head after seeing so many painting of St. Jerome at the Uffizi! Great band and song though.
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Final update hopefully coming soon!
Cheers!
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