We were going to make today a more relaxed day since our feet and legs ached from the sightseeing the day before but once I got out of the hotel I was too excited to pass on any opportunities. We stopped for an espresso; Steven’s favorite part of Italy is standing in an Italian café sipping an espresso at the bar, and went to get tickets for the Cattedrale de Santa Maria del Flore. We went to the bell tower to get our tickets and started our day with a climb up the 270-foot tower. It was quite a climb with the stairs and corridor getting narrower the higher up we reached. Thankfully the top of the tower was like walking through a cage so although my fear of heights kicked in I felt somewhat OK. The view was spectacular. As we perused around the top of the tower and took in the sights of Florence from above, the tourists must have started flocking to the sights. We began our descent down the tower and it became increasingly busier. Eventually we were smooshing through people to get down the stairs. With my back against the wall and a person squeezing against me to get up the tower I wiggled my way down. I was glad when we reached the exterior and surprised at how long the line for the tower had become. We walked over to the cathedral entrance and the line was several hours long to get in. With the ticket we purchased at the tower we were able to gladly walk past everyone and right in the cathedral. The cathedral has strict dress code and since I was wearing shorts I had to purchase a surgical gown type thing to cover up which Steven, who was also wearing shorts, found amusing. The cathedral is impressive. The exterior of the church is decorated in green, pink and white marble. The interior is huge and beautiful. I found a prayer area, lit a candle and said a prayer for my parents (mama mia’s one request for my trip). For me, the most exciting part was seeing the dome, which I remember from my college art history classes. Filippo Brunelleschi designed the dome (duomo), which was the first Renaissance dome and took 14 years to complete. The rest of the cathedral had been built while waiting for someone to design and build the dome. Inside of the dome the Last Judgment was painted by Giorgio Vasari and Federico Zuccari. It is a truly beautiful painting. After getting our fill of the cathedral’s interior, we headed on down to the crypts below. Unfortunately, the crypts weren’t as interesting as we’d hoped; they’ve been heavily excavated and reworked, and little of the original stone structure remained visible. Instead, they’d put in false floors and ceilings, flashy museum-style displays, and a huge gift shop that took up most of the floor space. Classy. We looked around for 5 or 10 minutes, glancing at the various Medici graves that had been left on display, and then made our escape back upstairs.

From the cathedral we went to the baptistery, a separate building. The baptistery contains copies of the bronze doors created by Lorenzo Ghiberti which face the Duomo. The doors, which I also remember studying, were created by Ghiberti after winning a competition and beating Brunelleschi. The inside of the baptistery contains beautiful mosaic tiled floors and the mosaic Judgment Day Jesus giving the thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgment.

Our next stop (remember our relaxing day idea?) was the Duomo museum. Much of the museum was closed but the original Ghiberti Gates of Paradise bronze door panels were on display. They were pretty fantastic. We also viewed one of Michelangelo’s Pieta sculptures.

With the baptistery checked off our list, the only part of the Duomo complex that remained to be seen was the impressive dome itself. Here we would be able to climb up the double-domed structure, view the painted interior from up close, and get a view from the highest structure in Florence once we reached the top. Unfortunately, this was where our all-inclusive ticket we’d gotten at the bell tower finally failed us. The ticket would give us free entrance to the dome, but unlike all the other attractions it would not allow us to skip the lines. By this point (only late-morning, still), the line wrapped all the way around 3 sides of the cathedral, and the temperature was already north of 100 degrees. We took a look at the lines, and both agreed that baking in a stone oven of a square for three or four hours wasn’t our idea of fun, so we headed back to our hotel once again.

After refreshing ourselves at the hotel, we headed back out again in the afternoon to do some more exploring. We hadn’t eaten lunch yet, instead relying on some gelato we’d grabbed earlier, and so we crossed the river into the southern part of town and stopped at a bar in a square to get some paninis. This was where our Rick Steves knowledge once again paid off: in Italy you pay different prices depending on whether you eat standing at the bar, eat inside, or eat outside at the table. We had our cappuccinos and paninis at the bar, and got to hear some other tourists complaining that the price was higher than they’d expected when they ate outside. Once we’d finished our food, we crossed over to the Santo Spirito Church located on the same piazza to take a look inside. This was another huge, impressive cathedral, with an incredible marble altar that was nearly the size of our house. The church also contained another Michelangelo sculpture, this time a wooden crucifix. He made the crucifix when he was 17 and donated it to the monastery for letting him dissect bodies to learn from. After we spent another 50 cents on another prayer candle for momma mia, we headed out to explore the southern part of the city for a little while, which we’d avoided so far. This area was a little less touristy and quieter, although we eventually ran into the massive palace and garden complex that were once the domain of (you guessed it), the Medici family. We stumbled upon an outdoor theatre that had been assembled for Roberto Benigni’s nightly readings of Dante’s Inferno. I briefly contemplated purchasing tickets but the language barrier might have made for a long performance. We crossed over the Ponte Vecchio which is Florence’s famous bridge (and the photo from the previous post). It was packed full of gold and jewelry vendors. The bridge is lined with stores on either side. After our wanderings I believe we called it a night. It was a long day.

Dad’s gelato shop- 

I decided that my goal for today would be to view Michelangelo’s David sculpture. After a delicious breakfast at the convent and no nun nightmares the night before as I had feared, I asked the hotelier for suggestions for buying tickets for the Accademia where the David is located. He gave us brilliant advice. The line to get into the Accademia can be several hours long. He told us to go to the less crowed museum of San Marco and have the ticket agent there set up a reservation ticket for the Accademia and the Uffizi Gallery. Without waiting in a single line we had our tickets for both. With our reservation ticket we were able to bypass the long line and go straight into the museum. In addition to David, the Accademia contains several of Michelangelo’s unfinished works: The Prisoners and St. Matthew. It also contains a number of paintings, and a lot of historical artifacts from Renaissance Florence. The main hall where David is located is stunning. We walked out of a gallery and down a long hallway with a sky-lit dome illuminating the 17-foot statue. It was impressive. The statue was carved from a single piece of marble and took him more than two years to complete; he was 26 when he started carving it. We walked all around the statue and both agreed we were not expecting it to be so impressive. A smaller gallery contained many plaster busts and smaller statues that were used to create larger marble ones. The smaller statues have many nails in them used to measure the depth of the piece to build the larger marble sculpture. In the gift shop Steven talked me into purchasing a mini David statue for my desk at school. It’s a marble to-scale replica and will always remind me of the awe I felt looking at this sculpture.

After lunch at a pizzeria with misting sprinklers to escape the heat (we felt like vegetables in the grocery store) we went to the Uffizi Gallery for our next ticket reservation. Again we were able to bypass long lines and get right into the gallery. (We felt like traveling pros). This museum was much larger than our guidebook led us to believe and took longer than expected (partially thanks to Steven, my dear reader of every sign in a museum). The highlights of the museum included viewing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Allegory of Spring, two paintings by DaVinci, many paintings by Lippi, several Michelangelo paintings, and Caravaggio, Giotto, and Titians as well.

I could not get over the lines to get into these museums. I kept thinking that people wait in line in Italy to see artwork like people wait in the US for amusement rides.  I also thought a lot about being an art teacher while looking at these works. My students comment quite a bit about not understanding why a work of art is so important. Usually they have just seen it via computer, if I’m lucky they’ve seen it in a book. Some of the pieces I saw today were just incredible and you have to actually see them in person to understand. I guess that is why tourists worldwide flock to these museums in the summer for that experience. I just feel incredibly blessed to have to have had this experience myself. My final thought about this. It is amazing that with all of the advances humankind has made we have stopped valuing artists as was done by society. There are not workshops and artists studying under masters. There are not great artists like Michelangelo who paint, sculpt, draw, and write poetry.

Enough of my thoughts. After a long day on our feet we went back to the convent for a little R and R. After feeling somewhat rested we went on our food hunt. We ended up at my favorite restaurant in Florence (so far), Trattoria Gargani. Unlike some of our other stops it was not overrun with tourists.  Steven had a pesto pasta dish and I had a spicy tomato sauce with spaghetti and tiramisu for dessert. While we were eating one of the waiters asked us where we were from. When we said the US he replied that he thought we were Northern European. He told us we were so lucky to live in a true democracy. It has been mentioned to us by our cycling guides that Italy is very corrupt. One guide mentioned that Rome is called the black hole where all the money goes. After having been in Germany the difference between the two countries was evident.  Italy seemed much more run down. Our waitress gave us two limoncellos while we paid our bills. I toasted my dad, the great maker of limoncello, and sipped on the digestivo.

After dinner we walked around town and found that in the cooler nighttime temperatures everyone is out and about. We made notes of places to visit during the day and called it a night.

On a side note- our convent has a very particular convent type smell. Not the incense church smell more of a moth balls and enclosed smell.