Happy Mothers Day to our lovely Mums !!This is our second day in Florence, and although we have seen some wonderful historical monuments and pretty views, we will be glad to leave behind the confusing and overcrowded streets when we leave this afternoon.
Having only 2 days here, it's a race to fit in everything so we thought we'd share the first day between Uffizi Museum, the Accademia Gallery and shopping, and the second day climbing the Duomo and checking out more markets. Our thought was to get up early on the second day and climb the dome to avoid the crowds already waiting on day 1. We again walked for 7 hours straight so, despite eating large quantities of croissants and pizza, our pants are starting to fall off us!
We've found Florence quite confusing to get around and have managed to break our blog motto of 'not getting lost' on more than one occasion. As it's a weekend also, the narrow footpaths have been hideously crowded and we reckon it's similar to a day at the Big Day Out. Unfortunately, our tour guide also forgot to mention that the famous Florence Duomo is closed on Sundays.. so our plan to get up early today to climb the 400+ stairs did not come to fruition, and I'm particularly gutted about that as the views are said to be fabulous.
Luckily though, our group caught a bus up a hill that looks over Florence last night and shared a picnic together, so we were still able to capture some beautiful pics.
The stores here are filled with amazing clothes and awesome leather products all at very resonable prices.. Every window is filled with amazing fashion displays - even the mannequins are beautiful in Italy! Unfortunately, after walking into just about every single store, we came out empty handed which was totally depressing! All the clothes we thought looked amazing in windows, turned out either not for sale, or the wrong sizes etc... We also seemed to strike loads of cranky sales assistants who, despite our attempting to speak Italian, were quite rude and unhelpful. It must have been our day to strike rude people... bound to happen I guess.. so we're hoping we've now used up our 'rude people' quota for the trip!!
The museums were amazing and I especially enjoyed seeing works by Artemisia Gentileschi after reading a book depicting her life story, and Dunc especially enjoyed seeing both Botticeli & Da Vinci's works. The statue of David was also wonderful. The detail Michaelangelo managed to acquire out of a lump of marble is beyond comprehension! We sat next to David for a few minutes to admire. (and no, not to admire what you're thinking... all the statues present the ancients as a rather under-endowed lot... the boys in our group feel quite pleased with themselves by comparison!)
Today we head to Lucca, a medieval walled village with around 5000 residents...
