Firenze and Pisa

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We left Rome and took the train back North to Florence. Here we stayed at the loveliest bed and breakfast, huge room and bathroom, A/C, decent food, and an amazing host. I would definitely recommend this place to anyone thinking about visiting Florence in the future. She greeted us at the door and pulled out a map to highlight all the things that we may want to see and the best ways to walk to them. After settling in, we went for a walk to the supermarket and picked up some dinner and wine to enjoy back at the B&B.

The next day, we headed out on a walking tour that Binnson created through Trip Advisor that included all of our host’s suggestions. We started off at Duomo, this cathedral was super impressive on the outside – it absolutely wowed us. We got in the large queue right away to check out the inside. The inside was... very underwhelming... - a total let down, almost completely bare. From there we went to Academia, the line was crazy long, even the reserved line was long – we couldn’t have been in line for more than 5 minutes frying in the sun before we decided we would try and reserve a spot that night for the next day. Instead we opted for an adventure to find some crazy good gelato place (Vivoli) that Binnson had read about, it was delish.

After some gelato’s we decided that we still wanted to check out some of Florence’s famous museums and walked down the street to check out Il Bargello. We accidently snuck into the museum, which houses many statues and works by Donatello, Michelangelo, etc. The side door had an arrow pointing to Ingresso and so I ingressed, even held the door open for an old lady to come in behind me. Oops. From here we headed to Piazza della Signoria, a square outside of the town hall that has many interesting statues outside including the copy of David and Perseus.

Uffizi Gallery line was also crazy long so we left to go to a famous bridge nearby (Pont Vecchio) that is lined with jewellery shops. It started raining and hailing pretty hard when we are on the bridge and Binnson jumped into a jewellery store to take cover. It probably sounds like we are having terrible weather with all of these crazy thunderstorms that keep occurring but with the hot temperatures in the morning and midday, I am almost grateful for the rain to come in and cool things down.

We covered more ground then we had planned that first day so the next day we set back out for Academia, we couldn’t get a reservation that night online but since we had nothing else to do, we didn’t really care how long the line would be. We wrapped around the corner from the entrance to reach the back of the queue, I read the rest of my book while Binnson watched some anime on his phone and it was a quick 2 hours later that we got inside. Academia houses the famous Michelangelo statue, David. Other than that statue, there is really not much of interest to see. A few more statues, some really old paintings, etc, but I would have thought a lot more would be inside for the consistently long line ups.

The next day we took the train to Pisa, we made an executive decision to fly to Barcelona instead of training across the south of France and the Pisa International Airport was the closest to Florence. We had been having good luck with B&B’s and decided to book another one in Pisa, but when we arrived it turned out to be a hostel with a separate building in the back which was a one room private area, this was our space for the night. Oh well, the Leaning Tower was directly outside our door as were the other tourist attractions. That night we went and walked around the square containing the tower, it’s actually surprising to see how much it is leaning- I don’t really know what I was expecting?! I wanted to take pictures of all the tourists “holding the tower up” as the line up of people doing the same pose was hilarious.

The day of our flight we still had time to kill so we stored our bags at the hostel and went back out to the tower. Right beside is a giant cathedral that we went and got tickets to go see. Inside was beautiful, the walls covered in paintings, murals and gold work on the ceilings, definitely worth the visit. After a last dinner of pizza, pasta, and gelato, we made our way to the airport to end our Italy adventure. I am definitely looking forward to Spain, Italy has been awesome but there are just way too many tourists.

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