Italy - Day 9

Florence
We set off this morning on two separate walks around the city, the first the Renaissance Florence walk, and the second the Walk to Piazza Santo Spirito. The Renaissance Walk started at the Ponte Vecchio Bridge, the only ancient bridge in Florence to escape destruction during World War II. It was constructed in the 13th century and was used as a butcher’s and grocery shop before being replaced by goldsmiths at the end of the 16th century. Today it houses mostly jewelry shops, with smaller vendors all around, and was worth the trip to see.

Ponte Vecchio Bridge

We then traveled on to the ancient deconsecrated church of Santo Stefano al Ponte and then to the Mercado Nuovo, a site on which there has been a market for centuries. This was very neat with many merchants selling leather, silk, wool and specialty hand crafted items. It is a large structure with massive columns that covers the majority of the square, and on the south side is the famous bronze porcellino (wild boar). It is said that if you rub his snout, you will return to Florence some day. Of course we both rubbed his snout.

Mercado Nuovo

Dan rubbing the snout of the porcellino

Not far from the Mercado Nuovo was the open air sculpture gallery and the Uffizi Gallery. We did not enter the gallery, as we have reservations for viewing in a few days. Outside were many statues as well as people posing as statues. Some were so realistic you did not know at first that they were not actually statues. We did see the replica of the David outside the gallery, which was impressive. We traveled on to yet another church, the Badia Florentina, and on to the Bargelio Museum, which used to be a prison. After grabbing sandwiches to go, we headed to the Piazza di San Giovanni and the massive duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore, that dominates the square. All we can say about this is “Holy jumping up and down Batman, that sucker is huge!” This church was incredibly ornate and had so much detail. The pictures we took do not do it justice, we just simply could not get the whole thing in our camera. Being Sunday, we did not go inside, so we plan to revisit it on Tuesday when we are at the Uffizi Gallery.

Santa Maria del Fiore (at least part of it)

We traveled on see Brunelleschi’s octagonal Rotonda and on to the Piazza Santissima Annunziata where we had our first serving of gelato this whole trip. The most notable thing about these two places, other than the good icecream, was the bad smell. Florence is definitely not as clean as San Marino. From here we walked to the Piazza San Marco, the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi and the Medici Chapels. Along our route was an open air market (yet another one) that had even more goods that the Mercado Nuovo. We eventually returned to the Piazza Santa Maria Novella and had a great view of the church. In total, we walked over 2 miles and saw many, many great things. It is too much to try to put into words, so I’ll leave that to the travel books.

Santa Maria Novella Church

After a break in our hotel room for a few hours, we headed back out for a second walk around this city, this time further south in the city. We walked to the Piazza Santa Trinita which marks the meeting of three ancient roads, and then on to the church of Ognissanti which houses Botticelli’s tomb and frescoes by him and others. We entered this church (mostly because we didn’t have to pay) and were awed by the frescoes covering the walls and ceilings. It was neat to see, but we are starting to get burned out on churches. Someone told us before we left to choose our churches carefully because after a while they become overwhelming. He was right.
We crossed the Arno River to see Porto San Frediano, built in 1324, whose massive wooden doors and portions of the wall are still intact. The wooden doors are quite massive, and it’s hard to believe they are actually from the 1300’s. We stopped at a local market to buy something to take back to the hotel room for dinner. It was quite simple, but was a wonderful dinner, something the locals would eat. We wandered a while more before returning to our hotel, satisfied we had seen a good deal of this ancient city.

Porto San Frediano (notice how large the doors are compared to the cars)