Amber thinks everything was early today. We got up around 7am and headed down to our first Italian breakfast. <it was served on a nice garden patio but that was probably the best part. We knew not to expect much, but it was still a little disappointing, especially since we don’t drink coffee.
After breakfast, we decided to go right to the train station and see when the next train left for Florence. It was a pretty nice ride and only took a little over an hour. Amber grabbed a quick nap, while I figured out where we should go once we got there. With this kind of transportation possibilities, we’re not sure why so many people are fighting against high-speed rail in Wisconsin.
We decided to check our bags at the station and go explore for a bit before checking into our hotel. It didn’t take us long to find the massive duomo (cathedral) with it’s bell tower and dome. We walked for an hour or so, then grabbed a so-so lunch in a small bistro.
The Duomo's dome is larger than it looks in this shot. Everything is so close to the duomo, it's hard to get a good shot from here.
Side Note: we didn’t want to pay for WiFi, so we’re on the lobby computer. It has an international keyboard so some of the keys are in weird places, making it very difficult to type this. It’s also really slow. We will have to add some pictures later (pictures have been added now). There’s an American Country song on the radio currently. Bizzare.
I never realized how much I depend on the left shift key and the enter key being extra wide until they weren't. Notice the shift characters across the top don't match, nor do any of those on the right side.
We checked into Hotel Centrale and found that this room has a much larger bathroom than the last one, but the shower is still pretty small. Otherwise, the room seems nice (we’ll see about the bed in an hour or so).
Next it was time to see David at Galleria dell’Accademia. The statue itself is pretty remarkable; the rest of the gallery was not. To be fair, there were a series of unfinished statues by Michelangelo that were gave a pretty clear picture of how he got from a block of marble to the final product. They didn’t allow any photography, so we don’t have any photos to share.
The Rick Steves book mentioned a museum where they had recreated some of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions and we thought it sounded pretty cool. It was, but you could tell some of the exhibits were suffering from the encouragement to play with them. We were through it pretty quickly; I resisted the urge to buy a Vitruvian Homer T-shirt.
From the museum, we wandered back through the city and down to the Arno River. Rick Steves had an audio tour to tell us what we were seeing, which was pretty nice for being free. We grabbed some gelato and enjoyed our walk past squares, churches, and lots of statues. We got to the river and decided to checkout Ponte Vecchio which is a bridge covered in small shops. Almost all of them sold jewelry of some kind, and most seemed ridiculously expensive.
Yum!
After crossing the bridge and wandering a bit more, it was time to choose a restaurant for dinner. We picked one that was quite a ways from where we were, but not far from our hotel. It turned out to be a great choice – 3 courses, two glasses of wine – for €60. We started with an appetizer of mixed cheeses, shared some fettuccine alfredo (the real stuff), and finished it off with veal (Amber) and chicken (Carson).
Amber is about done with this post, and I’m getting sick of typing on this thing. Stay tuned for another update tomorrow.