A trip to the Uffizi Gallery

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We are all tired and end up not getting up as early as perhaps we should have today, given our plan to visit the Uffizi Gallery. By the time we reach the gallery at 9:15, there is already a huge long line up. We join the line for what turns out to be a 3 hour wait. The whole affair is sort of oddly thought out for such a touristy place in that they could give out numbers and then have people return later. None the less, we eventually reach the front of the line shortly after noon.

You could easily spend and entire day in the Uffizi gallery and still not fully see everything. After 3 hours in line though, I am afraid we did not really give it all the time we should have.

After touring the initial galleries of Byzantine art, we moved in to rooms containing such famous paintings as Botticelli's “The Birth of Venus”. In other rooms, many of the religious paintings show the holy land as looking surprisingly like Italy. A sharp contrast to the Middle East we had been in just a few months ago.

The gallery has a uncompleted painting by Michelangelo which seems to perk Benjamin and Joshua's imagination. Another Gallery in Florence, the Academia, has more of his works and in someways I wish we had skipped the long line ups and gone there instead, but there is so much to see here, art wise, it is tough to do it all.

We had pizza for lunch and, after some searching, found our second hand bookstore from yesterday and managed to sell some of our heavy books. After buying food from the supermarket for dinner, we returned home to our apartment.

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