Florence, with pictures now

We picked Florence to have a one day stopover to break up the train journey to Naples around the half way point but weren't too excited about the city. Because we've both been here previously, we didn't feel the obligation to visit all the main tourist sites like the Uffizi, Duomo, etc.... and rather spent the day wandering far afield to see how Florentines live. Originally, we wanted to travel from here an hour and half out to Pisa but couldn't reserve tickets online to get into the tower (16 day advance minimum) so the odds of us getting into the leaning tower seemed slim enough to cancel that idea.

The worst thing about Florence is that although it's a Tuesday in late September, the city was still packed with tourists. Nick Tosches summed it up great in The Last Opium Den, " the all-American theme park, Florence, where today one would be hard-pressed to find a vero fiorentino amid the overcrowding herd of estivating tourists that is Dante's revenge."

In a similar spirit, pictured below is just a small exhibit of the amount of low quality crap that fills the streets and tourists just can't get enough of.

The Duomo is much more beautiful and colorful than the one we recently saw in Milan but we didn't go inside it.



This isn't the Uffizi gallery but was just outside of it with statues around the base of some of what was on display in the Uffizi. Ryan visited it years ago and, not to sound ignorant, didn't find any the art exciting or worthwhile for a return visit. Yeah, it's one of the top five galleries in the world but his opinion stands.

David, same name as Dr. Cheng. Any other similarities?

Shauna posing it front of a bridge which survived WW2 and exists like most other things in Florence, to sell crap to tourists.


For dinner we had to walk quite a bit out of the way to get away from the tourist menus. It's not a 'holier than thou' attitude we have to avoid as many tourist spots as we can but the reoccurring disappointment we meet when we take the easy route and eat at restaurants where the entire clientèle are tourists. There is a significant difference between travelers or tourists and we just like to think of ourselves as the former. Once again it did pay off with the extra effort to eat native but it's so hard to convey the excellent taste, ambiance and presentation of the meals we've been eating so we won't try to write much about that.