38th Day: Montecatini - Florence - Assisi

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Today we spent most of the day in Florence. We got there in the morning and Luigi took us to a spot that had great views of the city. We got our group photo taken there.

We were then driven down to Santa Croce Piazza and given time to shop at a leather shop there called Peruzzi.

We met up with the tour group after having a bit of a look around and went into the Cathedral which houses the tombs of Michelangelo, Gallileo and Dante!! It's pretty impressive stuff. Unfortunately some noisy restoration work was going on so we couldn't fully appreciate it. The tour guide was telling us about how Florence was flooded really badly back in 1966 and lots of the artwork was and the structure of the church as well as thousands of other buildings were badly damaged. We could still see the watermarks on the columns in the church, it was really really high. After the church we had a guided walking tour through the city. We saw various significant spots around Florence and ended up at the Academy of Fine Arts.

After waiting in the line for a little while we went into the museum and saw the Statue of David. It was amazing! It is much bigger than I remembered (from when I came 10 years ago), the tour guide told us Michelangelo carved it when he was only 26 (or something like that). We also saw some of Michelangelo's unfinished works.

After Florence we drove to Assisi, driving through Tuscany and Umbria to get there with all the gorgeous scenery. In Assisi we visited St Francis' Cathedral - it was beautiful and really interesting because the newer church had the older church preserved inside it. We then made our way to the hotel that was situated on a hill right next to a basilica and the view from the hotel was amazing, especially the sunset.

We had dinner in the hotel and then after dinner we went for a walk and found that they were rehearsing for a charity concert right outside the basilica. A sound check was going on so we stayed and listened to that for a while. We eventually found out that the band's name was Pooh! A bit odd, but apparently they are some really popular old school pop band. They sounded pretty good but of course we had no idea what the lyrics were. While we were listening there were a couple of priests there listening as well!

We then went back to the hotel and to bed.

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