Travels with Tutu: Florence

Little bullets about this day in Florence...we took the bus into town, armed with a tour book and a map, and set out on our own. We had 5 1/2 hrs to roam before catching the bus again for the 90 minute ride back to the ship. At first we thought we'd never see everything, and we didn't, but toward the end, we were just praying for the last stragglers in our group to get back to the meeting point so we could pile into the blessedly air conditioned coach and collapse.

• It was HOT--and HUMID
• We didn't book early enough to get tickets to the Uffizi Gallery or the Galleria d'Academia (where the REAL David is).
• We each had a different agenda-- he wanted science (as in DaVinci and Gallileo) and I wanted domes, churches, statues, and squares. So we'd periodically split up and agree to meet back at certain times and places.
• We both went to the major sites: The Duomo with it's splendid cathedral, bapistery, and campanile. I later went to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo while he went off in search of Gallileo.
• Together we wandered around the Piazza della Signoria where there are gorgeous statues by many well known artists, as well as the spot where Savonarola was finally executed as a heretic. It's huge, it was hot, and unless you wanted to pay $7.50 US for a cup of coffee, there were few places to sit (we discovered this after we agreed to meet here.)
• The REAL doors to the Baptistry have also been moved inside to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo...an air conditioned gem on a side street behind the Duomo.
• The Palazzo Vecchio has gorgeous frescoes -but climbing the stairs to the 3rd and 4th floor dampened my enthusiasm. My knees were doing fine, but since heat rises, and by the time I got there it wa 2:30 in the afternoon, this girl's amply endowed posterior was dragging.
• We didn't realize that the Santa Croce church where we sat outside dying of the heat contained Giotto frescoes, and Michaelangelo and Gallileo's tombs --there was a line to get in, and we didn't think we had any energy left for queuing. SIGH...........

This one is at the top of the list for plan another trip, in a cooler time of the year and just fly over stay there, see it all (HAH!) and come home. Florence has incredible Gelato. All the photos are on Facebook's public links (you don't have to have a FB account to view.)