Florence

 As I mentioned in a blog post several days ago, we took the overnight train from Paris to Florence (never try this yourselves) and found our way to Piazza San Marco, near our B and B, after finally figuring out the bus system (thank you Rick Steves). We had to kill an hour or two at a cafe overlooking the Museum of San Marco until we could check in, since we had arrived so early.  I was a little worried, since we were not able to find a Rick Steves recommended hotel in Florence, but the place turned out to be fine, run by a friendly and helpful young couple in a quiet residential neighborhood, as seen in the photograph on the left.

The buildings in this neighborhood were from the early 1400s, no less, and I find it truly amazing that these buildings are still in existence, much less have elevators, bathrooms, electricity, television, and all the other creature comforts, although on a much smaller scale than in the U.S. In fact, the only hotel we stayed at that didn't have an elevator was in Dallas, Texas (surprise!), but that is a story for another time.  The photo on the right shows the view out of our rooms, a building which I assume was a palazzo back in the 1400s from the looks of it, but I could be wrong.  That rooftop garden looks truly wonderful.  I think I could actually live there (in the building, not the garden).

In any case, once we got settled, we walked due south to the famous Duomo, where the line to get in stretched for what appeared to be miles.  My sister Susan asked if we were going to have to go in (she did not sound enthusiastic), and so we admired the outside of both the cathedral and the baptistery and then headed through very quaint and narrow streets to the Uffizi Gallery, where we had 3:00 o'clock reservations. The Uffizi Gallery, one of the greatest art museums in Europe, was (you are going to be shocked) packed to the gills.  This building once held the offices of the Medici, who controlled Florence, and is "U" shaped, with a large glass sided corridor running along the inside of that "U," where you could exit the exhibition spaces and find a little breathing room.  It was from that corridor that I took the photograph on the left of another one of Florence's sights, the covered bridge called the Ponte Vecchio.

It was raining when we left the Uffizi, and after taking a quick walk to the Arno to look at the Ponte Vecchio, we headed to the nearest cafe in order to recover from our most recent encounter with mass tourism. The cafe we choose was located on the Piazza della Signoria (as seen in the photo on the right), just across from the Palazzo Vecchio, which used to be the home of the Medici family until they ran out of space (that damn artwork) and needed something bigger, which turned out to be the Pitti Palace. The cafe was very quaint, everyone was very friendly, and at the end of the meal the waiter brought out an after dinner liqueur, which I thought was very nice until I noticed that they charged us for it.  I didn't feel like arguing, and so we paid the bill and took the bus back to the B and B. The next day we toured the gardens of the Pitti Place, which were very beautiful, and then picked up our luggage and took the bus to Siena.