Monday in Florence
We started the day by watching the Rick Steves historic walk tour so we could follow it later in the morning. Then we were dressed and off to enjoy our day. It was possible that the next few days would be rainy so we wanted to make the most of the sun shine. We started walking from the Duomo heading towards the Palazzi Veccio. Please forgive my spelling.
There is ancient sculpture everywhere. Most of the buildings date from the fourteenth and fifteenth century.
There were crowds of people everywhere enjoying the day.
At one point I was told I could touch the statues. Since most of them are on stands and the statue does not start until far over my head, this was hard to do. However a guard took some ropes down around some bronzes that I could totally touch and enjoy. I can’t even say enough to tell you how lovely these sculptures are. The detail in the muscle structure could not be believed. The humanist period, from the fourteen hundreds brought people’s bodies to life in bronze and marble.
Next we bought the one Florence museum pass we would need. Neal and I will get into all museums free and none of us will have to stand in line. These are three day passes and we won’t start using them until Wednesday.
Then we completed the walk to the Ponto Vechio Bridge. This bridge is the only one still standing of the first four bridges built in the very early days. There are dozens of little shops on it that all sell gold jewelry. This has been the case for hundreds of years.
On the other side of the bridge we stopped for a snack. I had the best hot chocolate since the last time we were in Italy. Actually that might be the last time I had hot chocolate.
We walked back towards home and stopped in a lot of little stores. Eventually we made our way to another place and had another snack only we had a wonderful Florence drink called Negroni and crostini.
I then chose to stay in while Neal and Peggy went to buy more Scotch. They came home and told me they found a second hand store. Neal bought me a stunning jacket.
It was nap time and then of course dinner. We ended up back at our usual place. I had wonderful pasta.