Italy, Day Eight: Florence

In Florence you have to make reservations for the main museums. We went to see David first thing, as it was just around the corner from our apartment. The rest of the museum is small - the whole thing is mainly just for this statue. 

I'm pretty glad I got to see it in real life. It really is quite impressive.

They do a good job of crowd management here, too - there are a lot of people but the room is designed well so you can always see. I guess it helps that it's also an enormous statue.

In the hall leading up to David, there are many half-finished statues by Michelangelo, which are pretty interesting! I don't understand how anyone ever makes more than one marble statue in their entire lifetime. What a pain.

This museum also had a couple of rooms dedicated to musical instruments, including the world's first upright piano!

It also had this creepshow of a painting. That is not a baby! How could the artist have completed this and thought, "ah, yes, that looks just like a real baby."

Then we walked through town and learned about Renaissance Florence through a Rick Steves audio tour. The Duomo, Florence's main church, is enormous and smashed right in amongst other buildings with only a small square in front, so it's hard to take the whole thing in.

It was immediately obvious that Florence is an art town, though. Everything here was even more ornate and over the top than in the previous cities.

David was originally created to sit outside this building in the main town square, but was moved indoors after some vandalism a few hundred years ago. There is an exact replica still sitting there outside, though - which makes you wonder, do I really need to pay to go inside that museum? I guess it's good to see the real thing.

The main town square area.

There were a million people along the river by the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge.

We found a little cafe for lunch in that area, because we had tickets to the Uffizi in the afternoon (which also was a madhouse scene). At the restaurant, I finally remembered to take a picture of an Italian toilet. 75% at least of the toilets we encountered had no seat. 1) WHY? 2) Are you supposed to sit down on that? Is that what people do? I read that the answer to the first question, mostly, is that they originally have toilet seats but then they get broken and nobody bothers to replace them. I still don't know if you're supposed to sit down on the rim or what, though. I personally did not.

After lunch we still had some time to kill so we wandered around. There was a huge line of people outside this meat store, which I have only just now googled. Those sandwiches do look pretty good.

At JFK waiting for Mom to arrive, I watched the Florence episode of I'll Have What Phil's Having, which a coworker recommended. He did a whole segment about Vivoli, which he insisted was The Best Gelato in the World, so we went there. It was definitely a step above most of the sidewalk places.

The Uffizi Gallery is arranged roughly in chronological order, so it's kind of a history of the evolution of Renaissance painting in Florence. We did Rick's audio tour, which helped explain a lot of the history and made it more accessible.

The view of the Ponte Vecchio from the gallery is nice, and you can see the connecting passage the Medici used to travel back and forth between home and office, without being exposed to the rabble.

I don't know what this is but I liked it.

And I took this because of the demonic baby Jesus and the attending skeleton man.

After this we went next door to the Galileo Museum, which was mostly deserted. Some nice Italian teens going in ahead of us gave us the discounted tickets they had gotten elsewhere, since teens get in for a discount anyway. This museum was pretty great. It has lots of historical science objects, not just Galileo-related items. I read that it also has three of his fingers, but alas, we didn't see them anywhere.

These are Galileo's actual telescopes!

This is some kind of lens-grinding machine I thought Ben would enjoy seeing.

After this we walked over to Basilica di Santa Croce, to see the tombs of Michelangelo & Galileo.

Florence's churches are really something else. Every square inch decorated with frescoes.

I walked past this and was like "wait," and took a picture to make sure later it was the right Machiavelli. This isn't mentioned in the books at all! Poor Machiavelli, overshadowed by Michelangelo down the hall.

The Michelangelo family tomb is being restored but I took a picture of Galileo's across the way.

After this we did a marathon hike back through the streets of Florence to our apartment. Florence in general felt more like a regular city than Rome or Venice. Outside of the tourist scene near the main attractions, it felt like a place that normal people live. There were even ethnic restaurants! We were going to go to an Asian noodle place but it was closed, so we ended up going to this place across the street, which was my best meal of the trip.

In Italy the first course is pasta, followed by a second course of meat. I'm not clear on whether they really do eat this way all the time, because it seems like a giant amount of food. This was the only night I tried it. I got cacio e pepe to start, which is just pasta with cheese and pepper and olive oil, and it was the single best thing I ate on the entire trip. Second course was steak with arugula and parmesan (I thought having the meat with only a salad was a smart idea) but even so I couldn't finish it. They asked if we wanted a box, which surprised me - so we said yes and I ate steak for breakfast the next morning.