04-14 Thursday "The Duomo"

Date: 04-14 Thursday
Location: Florence
Wheather: Cloudy with temp top of 22c

We leave Siena to Florence today by Train. Journey is approx 1 hour. Florence is our base city for visiting Viena and Rome.
By 10:30 we had arrived in Florence from Siena, checked in to the hotel and armed with a map and a destination hit the pavement to explore Florence. We followed the Arno River to the Ponte Vechico - the only bridge notto be destroyed by the WWII bombing. It is a bridge with stores onboth sides - mostly gold and jewellery. I was just about to turn to Jason to tell him the last time I was here there were street vendors/peddlers everywhere hocking sunglasses, watches, gizmos etc when we came across them. Except this time they had a hunted lookabout them and we watched as they packed up their wares in seconds and briskly walked away throwing glances over their shoulders. In about 50m and around a corner they were set up again watching for the police.

We stopped at the Galleria Delgi Uffzie only to be disheartened by thelong long queue and the estimated 3 hour wait. As we only had a short time to explore Florence so we continued on to the fake David in theLoggia della Signoria where we waited a long time before we had aphoto of him without a pigeon on his head. The Duomo appears without warning from the narrow streets around it. It is a huge structure with beautiful coloured marble façade. Entryis free and the inside is simple but elegant with amazing floorpatterns and a painted domed roof. We thought our house and yard could have fitted neatly inside the space at least 2 times. For E6.00 we opted to climb the dome. 463 narrow, steps up and 463 steps down. There are a few stops (sights) along the way. The first is a view ofthe dome from the inside several stories up. This gives you the chance to see the painted dome ceiling from a much closer point of inside. Now you are high high above the crowds below and right nextto the painted ceiling which still looms above you. Through a narrowdoor and some steep steps puts you between the inner dome and theoutter dome and finally a steep long climb straight up the inner domeand you emerge at the outside top of the dome. From there all of Florenze is visible (unfortunately through a slight haze of popultion) but we had a beautiful fine and sunny day to enjoy the scenery. It was humbling to think that the Duomo was begun in 1294 and finished150 years later without modern machinery.After the Duomo we followed the signs to a Leonard Di Vinci exhibitionof machinery. This was great. Using the drawings and plans of DiVinci\'s scaled down working models of his concepts were on the displaywith an explanation and hands-on try it. We found out he helped design 'cranes' and lifting machines to help build the Duomo.

Time for coffee.

We thought we might wander back to the Galleria Delgi Uffiz and see if we could get access considering it was late inthe day. To our surprise the queue was much much shorter and after only a half hour wait we were in at 5:15 (closes at 6:30pm). We walked to the second floor for the renaissance art and were absolutely stoked to see the original Botticelli's Venus and some DiVinci,Raphaelo, Both, Jacob and other works. By 6:30pm we were ushered through the bookstore and out. After dinner (and an excellent brushetta and pasta) we noted that a classical concert was about to be held in a small church. Eager forsome culture (and the accoustics of the church seemed pretty good) westopped and enjoyed over an hour of classical music from a pipeorganist and flutist. Very nice.