Florence - Day II

 

Our second day in Florence greeted us with a light rain in the morning. We were up early to visit the Santa Maria del Fiore and succeeded in beating the crowd. Unfortunately, however, we had to still wait 30 minutes because we also managed to beat the church’s scheduled opening time as well.

I have to say that I very much preferred the exterior of the Basilica to the interior, which was a bit bland and was supposed to correspond to the “austerity of religious life.”

We then walked around for bit, just wandering the streets. The following shop caught my attention. I can only imagine how much time it takes each day to set up / take down all of the goods on display just outside.

And here’s the place where people apparently like to lock their locks when they no longer want / need them anymore. It'd be interesting to know when the first lock was attached to the (no longer visible) chain.

Our next stop was the Basilica Santa Croce, a Franciscan church built during the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

While the interior was a bit austere as well, the church is very culturally significant as it serves as the final resting place for many notable Renaissance Italians, such as Michelangelo and Galileo.

Here’s a picture that I took of the church dome. Usually when I try to take pictures like this, they're never properly aligned. This one turned out pretty good, though.

We then visited the Galleria dell’Accademia to see perhaps the most renowned Renaissance masterpiece – Michelangelo’s David. I had high expectations beforehand given all that I had heard, and the statue far exceeded them. In fact, it is easily one of the most impressive works of art that I have ever seen.

As pictures were not allowed, I had to pull the following from Wikipedia.

In the afternoon we rented a car, as we spent the balance of the trip in the Tuscan countryside south of Florence. While heading out of town we stopped at the Piazzale Michelangelo and nearby San Miniato al Monte church. They’re in the hills above Florence and offered a very nice view back down on the city.

 

The graveyard of the church is apparently the burial place of Carlo Lorenzi – the author of Pinocchio. I did not know this at the time but thought it was an interesting fact. Here’s a picture of one of the graves that stood out.

We planned to spend the final two nights at a B&B just outside San Gimignano, a fortified medieval city roughly one hour south of Florence. During the drive down we stopped in the small town of Castellina di Chianti, which offered some nice views of 14^th and 15^th century architecture.

 



By the time we arrived in San Gimignano it was beginning to get dark and we still needed to find the hotel. Unfortunately, this wasn’t as simple as just following a map – the hotel was about 10 minutes outside the city in the middle of the countryside where the “streets” weren’t clearly marked (to the extent that they existed at all).

Thankfully, Emilie’s sense of direction in the Italian countryside is much better than mine, and she was ultimately able to find the one-lane dirt road that led us to our destination, which was literally in the middle of nowhere.