Final Europe trip, Post 3: Fabulous Florence

On Monday we set off from Venice to Florence (Firenze in Italian) in our hire car. We had lunch in some random town along the way, sheltering from the pouring rain and eating delicious pasta dishes that became some of our favourite meals on the trip.

When we reached Florence, where none of us had ever been before, we discovered that our accommodation for the next two nights - a 3-bed house tent at Camping Michelangelo - was on the side of a hill overlooking the beautiful city of Florence, and right next to the Piazzale Michelangelo, where one of the copies of Michelangelo's statue of David is (Florence is home to one other copy and the original). The first photo below shows our house tent and hire car, the second photo shows our campsite from the Piazzale Michelangelo (it's hidden under all the trees), and the third and fourth photos show the view of Florence from the Piazzale, and David.



That evening we wandered around the centre of Florence, an absolutely gorgeous city with lots of bridges, lots of scooters and motorbikes, and lots of elaborate gelati displays (see photos below). We were a little sad to discover that gelati had been much cheaper in Venice though (but we still ate some). We also saw quite a lot of small electric city buses, and even an electric three-wheeled one-seater car charging in a carpark (yellow one in photo below)!



There was a square in the city centre where there were a lot of statues, including the other copy of David and a Neptune. We think this was outside the museum where the real David is, which we didn't see. In another part of the city, across from the river in what we've just discovered was the courtyard between the Uffizi Gallery's two wings (thanks Wikipedia!), Ben was quite excited to find a statue of Machiavelli.



One of the things we loved about Florence was the Ponte Vecchio (meaning "old bridge" in Italian). This is a bridge with shops along both sides of it (mostly jewellers, souvenir shops and art dealers these days), and from the outside you can see that the shops jut out from the base of the bridge a little, and are supported by steel rods. Here are some photos of the bridge from various angles (the last photo is of the sunset as seen from the Ponte Vecchio this first night)...



We crossed the bridge a few times that night and the next day, and on this first night the centre of the bridge was occupied by a guitar-playing busker who had quite a sizeable audience gathered on both sides of the bridge, enjoying his songs and taking photos of the magnificent sunset. There is a gap in the shops on both sides of the bridge at the centre, making for a lovely view of the river in both directions, and a brilliant spot for a concert!! We listened to him for a while and bought his CD. Check out the photos and video below!

That night we had scrumptious pizzas for tea, and experimented with various camera settings to get some night shots of Florence on our way back up the hill to Camping Michelangelo. Check out the awesome night view from the Piazzale Michelangelo (fifth photo below)...



I think I've unintentionally toned down my raving about places in blog entries over the last year :P, but Florence is truly beautiful... interesting architecture, lots of culture, great shopping, wonderful food, and friendly locals. On one of our nights in Florence, a very old and small Italian lady, who spoke only a little English, saw Ben lift me down from a wall and stopped to call him a gentleman and wish us a nice holiday. :) Florence was the perfect place to visit in between seeing Venice and Pisa (our next destination), which are both very comercialised and feel as though they would be almost empty if all the tourists were to disappear.

Anyway, I was going to write about the next day now as well, but this entry is already quite long, so more next time! :) Bye for now!