Firenze

Why we call this place Florence and they call it Firenze is a question that puzzles us. But no need to think about that with all the fantabulous art and architecture. Florence is one of my favorite cities and I think Brooke would agree. We stayed here 4 days to cram everything all in. It has so much beautiful art and architecture that it is just ridiculous. This statue of Perseus and Medusa by Cellini, considered his masterpiece, is just sitting in a plaza next to like 10 other gorgeous statues.


We happened to eat in a restaurant that night named Cellini. It was a rather unremarkable restaurant in a normal semi-touristy part of town. We mentioned something about the statue to the waitress and she was like ´oh yeah, this restaurant was Cellini´s childhood home.´ Well smashing. Incidentally we would return to this restaurant several times. It was delicious and well-priced. After spending time in Northern Italy and Switzerland, anything even remotely normally priced was a blessing. Florence seems to be known for Bistecca al Florentine, basically a steak. Now, I didn´t come from Texas to eat steak, I don´t care what kind of special cow it is. We were just fine with fresh salads, a variety of hearty Tuscan soups and pasta (with gorgonzola and speck). The only drawback to the food here is that they make bread without salt, and it is pretty bad. They had some fight with Pisa or something and they cut off the salt supplies back in the day, so they made saltless bread and I guess they do now just out of tradition. No thanks.

We went to the Duomo which is just enormous. They designed it to be big, then made it 1.5 times bigger. So much so that it eats up pretty much the whole square that it is in, which makes it appear a little out of its element, but spectacular nonetheless. The dome continues to be a feat of engineering, it was built without scaffolding and is so huge, even today they are not sure exactly how it was built. It is actually two domes within each other and housing and restaurants where built in it so the workers would never have to leave. We hiked the 500 or so steps to the top and were rewarded with sweeping views of Florence and the surrounding countryside.



Our hostel had some free walking tours in the mornings which we took advantage of and were really informative.

The Bargello, the old prison and sheriffs office, is now a sculpture museum. Among the Cellinis and Michelangelos is the main attraction, Donatellos bronze David. Unfortunately for us he was lying face down with his butt in the air while he was being restored. Too bad, but an informative restoration video was just as good....not really though.

On to the Uffizi. Sounds sexy in Italian, but it just means the office. It was built as an office for one of the Medicis, possibly I am guessing here but it is a safe guess, and then was turned into a museum in the 1700s or so, one of the first free museums open to the rabble. Not so free anymore, we made reservations to avoid waiting in an interminable line. The building is beautiful and it looks out over the Arno river and Florence. The main attraction is Boticellis masterpieces the Birth of Venus and Primavera. The Primavera might be my favorite painting. The size of these paintings just blow you away when you are in there.

Michel Angelos, Dave. The David. Nothing can realy prepare you for this statue. It is positively enormous. It was carved out of one piece of marble which another sculptor abandoned because he couldnt make anything useful out of it. The attention to detail makes it look as if he could come to life. The room he is in was built specifcally for this statue. There is some other statues by ol´ Mikey in there which are called the slaves because they look like they are trying to escape from the stone. It is possible they were not finished and also possible that he just sculpted them this way, I guess we will never know.

Allright, enough art and culture, let´s get some vino flowing!