The second stop on my journey through the mainland was Florence. After arriving on the train we took a walk around town. We saw the Cathedral of Santa Maria which was really beautiful and surprisingly clean. Apparently they are always cleaning it. We continued walking around and saw a square with a lot of statues in it but I forgot to take a picture. Also went through a walkway that had a bunch of statues of famous people from Florence and I thought it was cool because it was a hall of fame. I also forgot to take a picture of that. We saw the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge) and Serena told us that it used to be really smelly because it had a lot of butcher shops, and then a duke decided that he didn’t want the bridge to be gross anymore so he made a law that only jewelry shops could be on the bridge. 

The next morning we got up and planned to go into the Cathedral but the line was very long. Instead we went to a leather market–leather is a big thing in Florence–and helped Micah shop for a new purse. 

Then we crossed the river and went to the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens. The Pitti Palace was a huge building that once housed the royals of Florence and is now a museum. There’s a lot of art on the walls but I was mostly looking at the rooms. Almost every room in this building has beautiful ornate ceilings. There were placards saying what rooms were, and most of them were pretty unimportant rooms, but they were still beautifully decorated. I also liked that a lot of the art depicted Roman mythology, which is a nice break from all the Christian art in Italy. 

Outside of the palace was the Boboli gardens, which was a VERY large (large enough to require a map) garden area with lots of statues and fountains. 

All of this was a lot of walking. According to my phone, I walked about 8 miles but it felt like more because museum walking is a lot of standing around while not taking many steps. We were supposed to meet with Serena to go to a square and get a panoramic, sunset view of Florence but we were too tired and just went back to the hotel. Also it was 90 degrees out, and this contributed to the exhaustion. I may forget to mention this is recaps but it’s 90 degrees every day here. 

The next morning we got up early to make our 9am reservation at the Accademia Gallery. I saw the statue of David and I thought I wouldn’t be that impressed by it because I’ve seen plenty of pictures of it but I was impressed. It’s so big and the detail is so good–you can see all the veins on David’s arms. 

In the same hall as the David they had some unfinished statues. I thought these were really cool because it’s hard to imagine how marble statues are made but these gave insight as to how artists chip away at big blocks of marble. 

Most of what’s in the museum is Christian art, which is fine but not that exciting. There was a section where all the art looked like the one below and I thought it was funny because the faces are so bad. 

Next we went to the Leonardo Da Vinci museum, which is not such a serious place. The museum attempted to create a lot of the things Leonardo Da Vinci wrote about in his notes, like flying machines and a weird round tank. 

One part of the museum had a bunch of interactive machines that demonstrated concepts Leonardo had written about and that was very fun. 

One of the machines was just an idea for a safety system for a lifting crank. There’s a wheel with a jagged edge and a block sticks in the edges to prevent it from turning backward. This makes it so you can lift things up but they won’t fall down unless you remove the block. Hard to explain but you might bet it from the picture. For some reason this simple safety mechanism was my favorite. 

So that was Florence. We grabbed some gelato before leaving and then hopped on a train to Lucca–a lesser known town that you will hear about in my next post.