Sticky Days of Summer

The adventures continued in Florence, where it was very very hot. Because of that, I'm afraid, I did not have as good a time as in the other cities. Nonetheless, Florence had its perks. It was incredibly walkable, despite its lack of trees and other greenery.

To combat the heat we ate a lot of gelato. A lot. So did this monk apparently:

One afternoon we climbed the Duomo (all 400+ steps) with this incredible view as our reward. Look how much higher we are than the Campanile (clock tower)!


The front of the Duomo and the Campanile from the ground.
One afternoon we went to the Uffizi gallery. I think I can safely say that I have seen every piece of important Italian art and a good deal of the unimportant stuff as well. It was an epic museum event. (There are pros and cons to travelling with an art major). Part-way through, to refresh ourselves, we had insanely expensive chilled coffee (tasted like a Tim Horton's ice cap) at the museum cafe. This is me wearing the Duomo as a hat (it totally works, ok!)
More of the Duomo. You could never really see all of it at once, or take a picture of it, so you never really a got a true idea of how massive it is.

The Baptistry with the famed bronze doors. We never managed to get in the Baptistry; it was closed a lot. We did go to the Museo della Opera which had a lot of the original panels, sculptures etc. from both the Duomo and the Baptistry.


The non-art highlight of Florence for me was the evening Bronwyn and I went to get gelato and stumbled across a Rolling Stones coverband called Hey Mama playing on a little stage in the square by our apartment. They were a group of middle-aged Italian men rocking out to a crowd of children and parents. There were a lot of children there. It's that sort of unexpected, public, spontaneous event that makes any trip a bit more fun.