Tour Florence Today - Travel Tomorrow

Hello Everyone!

We had a full day of touring Florence today. We started by walking from our Hotel, through the Market square over to the main church or Duomo named Santa Maria del Fiore. We had decided that we were going to climb Brunelleschi's Dome for a panoramic view of the city to start the day. You may remember that we climbed the Bell Tower next to the Duomo just a couple of days before. You might be wondering why on earth we would climb up 414 steps to the top of the Bell Tower, and then days later climb up to another high vantage point just yards away. I wondered this myself for 463 stair steps. The view from the top was spectacular in the morning light.

Long Climb up

Great Views!

Kind of a long ways down

We did spend quite a bit of today seeing the famous Cathedrals of Florence. After climbing the Dome, we went to Santa Croce were we enjoyed the Art and Architecture, and all of the famous dead people. Some of the folks buried there include Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Galileo, Marconi, Fermi, and Da Vinci. They also had a wonderful museum that we enjoyed touring. The exhibits were interesting and we missed being out in the hail storm that blew in for about 10 minutes. The weather went back and forth between sunny and threatening clouds and occasional rain. We were pretty lucky, we missed being out in the rain.

Michelangelo's Tomb 

Lighting a candle at Santa Croce

Santa Croce

We saw several other churches including some that weren't supposed to be open according to the guide books. Better yet, we got into most of them for free, including some that were listed as having a charge in the guide books. We had an all around good day. We spent some of the time between the churches enjoying the Piazzas particularly when the sun was out.

Orsanmichele

Fountain of Neptune - Piazza Della Repubblica

Piazza Della Repubblica

We thought about having dinner at a restaurant that we had heard about, but with the dark clouds moving back in right at sunset, we picked up some groceries and headed back to the hotel.

Tomorrow we head for the airport and travel to Berlin.

We are happy to hear from several of you that you are enjoying the photos. We glad to hear that. There isn't much opportunity to fix them up while we are traveling so they are for the most part right out of the camera. In fact one of today's shots has a classic photographic mistake, perhaps you spotted it.

These pictures and the rest of today's are in a Picasa web album at this link. Hitting the "slideshow" button is a quick way to see them.

We hope you are all well. Hopefully we will continue to be on line in Berlin.

Stephen & Linda