Europe Travel Diary – Part III – Florence and San Marino
Previously: Part II – Venice
We arrived in Florence from Venice on Wednesday August 30 and spent the afternoon at the Museum of the History of Science. This is by far, one of the coolest museums I’ve ever been to. They had an amazing collection of scientific and mathematical instruments, globes and maps of the world. They also had Galileo’s right middle finger. There’s something you don’t see everyday!
After the museum we wandered through an open air market, ate our daily gelatto and went back to the hotel for a siesta. We then went to a lovely local restaurant for dinner. The food in Florence was excellent. I’m not sure if this is because by now we’d learnt to avoid anything called a tourist menu or because we were in Tuscany and I believe the Tuscans know how to eat. My favourite was the Ribollita which is a vegetable and bread soup.
The next day Mom, Allison and I embarked on a day of gluttonous country counting. As you probably know my family likes to keep track of the number of countries we’ve visited and we aim to keep that number above our age. On this trip I’d already picked up Italy and the Vatican City. Like the Vatican City, Italy has another enclave: the Most Serene Republic of San Marino. It’s a tiny country (61km^2) but a country it is and therefore we had to visit. From Florence we took a train to Bologna, then switched to a train to Rimini and then took a bus to San Marino. Once in San Marino we wandered around the old city, found the tourist office and paid 2.5 euros to have them stamp our passports. Technically we did not sleep in San Marino which is typically a requirement of country counting be we decided unanimously to waive that requirement in this particular case.
The trip back to Florence was a bit of an adventure. First our bus back to Rimini was about 10 minutes late which meant we were going to have a tight connection to catch our train. As it turned out our train from Rimini to Bologna was also running late which was good because it meant we hadn’t missed it but bad because it was going to get to Bologna too late for us to make our next connection. So we got switched onto another train going to Bologna but we didn’t have seats and the train was already sold out so we had to stand in the snack car! We thought we’d only have 6 minutes to switch trains in Bologna but thankfully the train to Florence was running 5 minutes late so we made it back!
The next day we had reservations to visit the Academia first thing in the morning. We got there plenty early and while we waited Mom and I went to a little café and had the most amazing cappicunio ever. It was everything I dreamed an Italian cappicunio should be! The highlight of the Academia was (obviously) Michelangelo’s David but The Prisoners/Captives were also very impressive. We then visited the cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore also known as the Duomo. We all visited the inside of the Duomo and then I decided to climb the steps to the top to see the view. It was only about 460 steps but they were narrow and dark so it was a bit of an adventure.
On our last morning in Florence we visited the Uffizi Gallery. By this point we’d seen a lot of paintings entitled “Madonna with child” and I was growing tired but at the Uffizi I got to see one of my all time favourite works of art: “The Birth of Venus.” We also had excellent cappuccinos at the Uffizi (see below – doesn’t that look amazing). Later that afternoon we took the train back to Rome …
