Florence

How is THIS for a picture?

On the morning after my day in Milan, I caught a train to Florence that had me there at around 11:00am. The hotel was an easy walk from the train station, but per usual, it was too early to check in. So I put the most valuable things in my smaller backpack, got a map from the concierge, and left my big bag with the hotel as I set out to see Florence. My parents would arrive around 5:00pm, so I had time to do some exploring before then. I didn’t want to do too much without them, though, so I started by just walking around town.

I liked Florence from the start. It’s a moderately sized city, and it’s great for an aimless stroll. The streets are big enough for cars to get around but never wide and intrusive like some of the smoggy thoroughfares of Rome. And while it may not have ruins and monuments at every corner, the whole place still feels distinctly Italian. The buildings are beautiful. The streets are clean. The whole place is very photogenic. With its smaller scale and authentic atmosphere, Florence appealed to me in many of the same ways that Seville did. And it didn’t hurt that the weather was starting to cool off a bit and stayed nicely in the 80s for the next week or so.

After walking around a bit and finding lunch, I made my way toward the Uffizi Gallery. Many characterize Uffizi as a world-class museum somewhere in third or fourth behind the Louvre. Florence made a big deal out of it, and I had time to kill, so I decided to check it out.

The first thing that I checked out was the line. That took an hour and fifteen minutes – maybe because it was Sunday afternoon; I don’t know. But I do know that I spent more time in that line than in the museum. But that’s the nice thing about going to museums by yourself – you set the pace. Let’s face it. Everyone wants to walk faster than they actually do when they’re at a museum with someone else. You either wander on gradually when the other person is checking out something patently uninteresting or you just amble slowly in general so that no one judges you. In reality, most of the art in museums is interchangeable, and only so many things can really interest you. I always want to go through it faster. And I did. I came; I saw; I conquered.

It was a worthwhile museum. I’m not any more sure how you judge the quality of a museum than how you judge the quality of a painting, but Uffizi had about 5-10 pieces that I recognized from Art History class (and so probably twice that many that we covered in that class and that I promptly forgot). The most famous piece in Uffizi is the Birth of Venus. I like Roman mythology, and I like that painting, so it was nice to see it. You can see it here. I saw it there. And then I kept walking.

After the museum, I walked around a bit more to get my bearings around Florence before returning to the hotel to check in and meet my parents. They arrived at about 5:00, and then we headed to Florence’s duomo – the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (12) – to attend mass.

Amidst all the churches that I have seen, the cathedral in Florence stood out a bit from the beginning. I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting, but I was surprised when I turned a corner into the large plaza to see it. The exterior is decorated like no other church I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to discern from these pictures, but the parts that aren’t white are all pale red and green. The church itself is pretty large, and the plaza also features a tall bell tower and a large baptistery in the same style. Together, they create quite a sight. I just remember walking into the plaza and thinking, “Whoa.”

Florence’s duomo was also the first on this trip in which I actually attended mass. When mass is held, the cathedral is closed to tourists, so it was significant to experience the church how it was originally intended. The services were entirely in Italian but still relatively familiar, and then we walked around the plaza a little bit more. Later, on our second day in Florence, my dad and I would climb some 500+ steps to the top of the bell tower to enjoy the view.

After mass, my parents and I walked around a bit more and saw the impressive Piazza della Signoria. The large, iconic plaza has at least a dozen impressive statues including a replica of Michelangelo’s David. Since you can’t take pictures of the original in the museum, the replica provides the best photo opp. (It does look way better in its nook in the museum, though.) And in general, the plaza is one of the cooler ones that I’ve seen in Europe.

Also located on Piazza della Signoria is Palazzo Vecchio. This palace once belonged to the powerful Medici family – and apparently so did a huge amount of land and buildings throughout northern Italy. Their name came up a lot. And though it seems like their importance morphed over the years, at one point in time they were influential nobility. So they have a lot of palaces, and we toured this one. It was just alright; I’ve seen better. (And it's awesome that I can say that.) Then we caught dinner and walked back to the hotel along the river.

We spent the next day visiting Pisa and Lucca. But after we returned to our home-base in Florence, I drug my parents out to Piazzale Michelangelo – a plaza high on the edge of town that provides the best views of Florence. Then we walked by yet another church (13) and a few more plazas on our way to dinner.

(You won't see many pictures of my parents on these pages because, even though I insisted on taking some, those pictures were almost always on their camera. And well, they're not here right now. I'll have to fix this later.)

As you may have noticed, I like to try local foods at all the cities we visit. When I was in Milan, I heard that the region was responsible for beef carpaccio, but I didn’t get a chance to have any. So on my second night in Florence at a restaurant with my parents, I ordered some. For those of you drawing a blank, beef carpaccio is basically thinly sliced uncooked steak. To make it safe to eat, the chef somehow treats it with citrus juices that make it just as harmless as cooking it would. I was a little skeptical at first, but it was actually very good – probably one of the better meals I had in Italy.

(Replica)

Finally, the third day we devoted entirely to what was left of Florence. We started by visiting the museum that housed the famous statute of David. I had previously seen a replica in the British Museum and in the Piazza della Signoria, but the original was still very impressive in its place of honor. I tend to appreciate sculpture more than painting, and so this museum – which was filled with statues and plaster molds – was kind of cool to walk through. There were also a few English tour groups walking around from which I could leech some information. I love doing that: extra context, no price, walk away when it's boring.

After seeing David, we walked through the larges San Lorenzo street market proceeding back to the duomo where, as I mentioned, we toured the inside and climbed the tower. Then we walked down Via de’ Tornabuoni – which is basically more of what Monte Carlo and Milan had to offer. My friend Amanda mentioned that we might see a few celebrities there, but we didn’t have any luck. (We did do pretty much everything on your list of recommendations, though, Amanda, so thank you for that.)

To round out our day and our time in Florence, we walked across the much-photographed, built-up bridge Ponte Vecchio, strolled through some gardens, saw another church (14), and had a pretty solid dinner.

As I implied at the beginning of this post, Florence has been one of my favorites. I always had thought of it as a lesser Rome, and so I wasn’t prepared to like it as much as I did. Having been there, I think I like it more than Rome in many ways. And it seems that Americans in general enjoy Florence as well. You can hear quite a bit of American English around the streets, and it’s a popular choice for study abroad - which starts just about at the time we were visiting.

If you’re only going to one city in Italy, you still probably should make it Rome. But if you’re going to two, pick Florence. I liked it a lot.

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More pictures of Florence:

(Remember that you can always click to make them bigger.)