This morning we headed to Venice with a brief stop in Florence. But first, we had to get to the train station. It is about 1.5 km from our hotel, so we asked the guy at the desk the best way to get there (we originally walked from the train station - but were in no mood to do that with our heavy bags). He said he could call a cab, but we could walk. Tom told him that we'd probably prefer to cab it, and his response was priceless: "But you are strong". Tom quickly agreed that he was strong, but would still prefer to ride.The train to Firenze was fairly quick and we we
re there by 11 AM. We decided to spend 3.5 hours there, figuring that would be enough to do everything we wanted. However, an hour and a half later, all we had seen was a line to the Academia Gallery (statue of David) and an even bigger line into the Duomo (monster church). At least we now have something to look forward to on our next trip to Italy. We did see the Ponte Vecchia bridge and a copy of the David statue. Overall - we were less than impressed. It seemed there were many more tourists in Florence than even Rome, and it was a bit annoying. The highlight of the day was when the cops came down a street which sent the hustle men running. We've never seen people move so fast. They obviously have the art of packing up their counterfeit goods down to a science.
Satisfied that there was nothing left in Firenze, we took an early afternoon train to Venice. April is looking forward to a romantic gondola ride tomorrow evening, but Tom is more interested in reliving some of their great canoe rides in the Concord river, where we tried to tip over other canoes (except for nerds in kayaks).
1 comment:
Ponte Veccio is marvelous.
There's always a line to the Galeria, a.k.a. Galeria Ufizzi (easy to get into if you pay E10 premium for advance tickets and have all day to walk through), as well as into Duomo. Actually two lines - one to get inside and one to the stairs to the top of the dome - nice city panorama there.
But there's a much smaller line into the baptistery, which is a former Mars (I think) temple converted by Christians into the baptistery. The gold-covered doors (a.k.a. Doors to Paradise) are actually a bronze copy - the original doors are in the city museum behind the Duomo. There are 8 Biblical stories depicted on them. Inside the baptistery - nothing worth seeing. You can marvel the doors from the outside.
Duomo is a beautiful, and as you correctly described it, enormous church. It's the biggest building in the city, and probably almost twice as big as the next biggest. When it was built, it could fit the entire city's population in it - 70,000. It took 140 years to complete - takes time to lay 4,000,000 bricks side by side.
Post a Comment