Firenze / Florence travel

Well we will miss the fireworks in Venice on their festival day, but I suppose you can’t hit everything with perfect timing. Speaking of which, I keep rereading the blog posts the morning after and finding lots of silly phrases and an abundance of exclamation marks – sorry guys, not very streamlined! I guess it’s the product of falling asleep several times during writing, so I forget what I’ve already been excited about. I’d say I’d try to be more awake when I write them up but I can’t promise that at all haha. Oh well!

Anyway, Florence today – another eurail day down! The train ride was uneventful and we got into town around 1pm. A guy was waiting for us in front of where we thought we were staying to tell us that our reservation had been changed and we had been upgraded to an ensuite room (as opposed to shared bathroom) in one of their sister hotels down the street. Then he said that we would be in a different room for our second night. Pretty sketchy sounding but he seemed pretty legit, walked us up and explained everything, and the room is very nice and has free internet so we think it should be okay. In a few of the reviews for hostels and hotels in Italy we saw that this was a possibility anyway. I guess it’s just part of the experience!

We had a quick turnaround and set out for a bit of wandering. We were able to see a lot of main drags, get through the terribly touristy market without buying much (I got a replacement for my green scarf, really cheap), AND hit the Duomo, the baptistery, and the belltower (all 414 steps up!) before our date with the Uffizi pre-booked ticket time. The Duomo church itself is huge on the outside, with green and white marble all over, but on the inside it isn’t very complicated. Sure, it’s huge, and it has cool geometric shapes in marble on the floor, but it’s very empty in the middle. That part was free though! So we didn’t feel so bad paying for the baptistery, which was pretty interesting with gold ceilings and a somewhat awkward rendition of Jesus and Hell. The belltower was a pretty good haul up but the view was great, so it was definitely worth it. Lots of red tiled roofs! It did mean that I was really tired for the Uffizi though, but it seemed like a lot of the museum was under construction or renovation so it seemed like it was tired too. We saw the Birth of Venus and Primavera, both super famous, amongst other Italian works of art. We’re still not really art people but we plan to hit the museums anyway just to say we did. The old art is interesting from a daily life kind of perspective (fashion, food, etc) anyway. We might have got more out of it if we had consulted our audioguide a bit more, but ultimately it was not that useful. We have eyes, we can use them!

Dinner was next, and we wandered around for some time, stopping in and out of places (sometimes getting a croissant or something) kind of aimlessly. The Osteria Bea Vita in Venice really spoiled us. I think we ended up stopping at a reasonable place tonight though (the Antico Ristoro di Cambi) if compared to Spain at least. The table bread was pretty terrible but we asked the waitress for recommendations and she nicely steered us away from the stomach and brains (!!) and towards more traditionally delicious things. We got a meat plate (reminiscent of Spain), lasagna (we hadn’t had any in Italy yet!), some traditionally prepared kind of beef, a lemony drink and a chocolate-drenched ice cream for dessert. It was all pretty good, so the bread ended up not being such a severe warning. Hoorah!

We got back to the hotel pretty early but we had a pretty huge day of touristing – even on a travel day! – so it’s justified. My first impression of Florence is way more touristy than Venice, if that’s even possible. I guess it’s just that finding the nontouristy parts of Venice were easier since you had less area to search, or something. Or maybe it was just one of those cities, like Sevilla, that will be destined to stand out. Ahh well. Now to just finish up a few things and crash!