Ahhh, Florence. What a city. I’m not sure there is anywhere that I know of that has more cultural bang for the buck per capita as this city. When, as one docent told me, “we have Leonardos in the basement because we have nowhere to put them,” then you have a wealth of cultural treasures.

The trip to Florence was fairly smooth. Money can buy time on vacation, so we sprang for the high-speed train to Florence from Verona, which cut ninety minutes off the travel time. We had a slight odd result on my travel phone that sent us to the wrong hotel, which delayed us, but we dumped our stuff at our real hotel and were ready to tour the town around 11:30.

Neuf had expressed a desire to go to the Uffizi art museum. None of us other than Meredith had been, so it was a strong plan to start with. In looking up information on the museum, I saw that the old Medici private walkway above the city was still intact and open to the public for an extra fee at the Uffizi. That locked it up for me since I had wanted to see that for some time. We needed to tour the place.

We walked from our hotel to the Uffizi by way of the Duomo, the magnificent cathedral of Florence. The place was a mad crush of people, but still impressive. I have no idea what was going on here today as far as drawing tourists in, but it was as crowded as I have ever seen in here in the center of the old city, and that includes being here in summertime. There were people everywhere.

We walked on through to the Piazza della Signoria, home to the Medici fortified palace and a huge square filled with tons of sculptures that are all impressive, including a replica of the David, which replaced the real thing back in the 1800s after the original was moved inside to protect it. The square is also the start of the line for the Uffizi.

Our wait wasn’t terrible – it was about forty minutes for us to get in. Meredith’s guidebook had said the Uffizi only allows six hundred guests into the museum at a time, so there are no pressing crowds inside. That was mistaken fact number one. The place was very crowded for most of the galleries, including some that were so full as to make moving through them difficult. Mistaken fact number two from the guidebook was that the museum is small in size and manageable. We flew through the rooms, just looking around and reading almost nothing about the art, and in the two hours we spent in the galleries, we still didn’t see everything. To do the museum real justice would take six to eight hours.

The Uffizi has multiple works from three of the four Ninja Turtles, and has the art mostly displayed in chronological order, starting in the late medieval period. Seeing the art progress, especially treating the same subject matter (there were many Jesuses, Marys, and John the Baptists represented), was very helpful. Painting took a huge leap forward for realism in a short amount of time in the 1400s and 1500s.

The building itself was also a star. The main corridor that connects the gallery rooms runs the length of the building on two sides and is open the whole way. There are huge glass windows down the hallways, and they afford views of the city. The entire hall is lined with sculpture and hard-to-see portraits hung very high up the wall.

We had a 3:15 entry time to the Vasari Corridor, which is the mile-long city-spanning elevated hallway that the very rich and powerful Medici family had built in just five months. It allowed the Medici to go from their home to the Pitti Palace across the river without ever having to go outside and risk being among crowds of people. It spans the top of the Ponte Vecchio bridge and weaves along the rooflines and around towers of the town. It also gave the Medici family a way to go to church privately, since the corridor has a window opening to the interior of a church along the way. This family had means.

Fun fact about the corridor – in World War II, the Germans blew up almost all the bridges across the Arno to slow the Allies down. The Germans couldn’t bring themselves to blow up the Ponte Vecchio, so they blew up buildings on either end to block it. The Allies just used the corridor to cross the river instead. The Germans blew up the ends of the corridor as a result, and it was finally restored and opened to the public in the 1970s.

The corridor spat us out in a corner of the Boboli Gardens of the Pitti Palace, which I still very much want to see. We got to see a very small part of the gardens and palace on the way out. That dumped us very near a small square my brother had recommended, and we walked there to get a very late lunch in the form of gelato. My hazelnut was quite excellent, but I found the chocolate to have a slightly weird taste. Not bad, but unusual.

From there, we walked back across the Ponte Vecchio like mere ordinary people, and headed back to the hotel to regroup and get more clothing. The evening was all about enjoying the city for itself, and getting supper. We walked over to the church of Santa Croce, which I find to be a lovely church. It has the same green and white marble as the Duomo, but on a more human scale. Then we went on to walk along the Arno to the Ponte Vecchio, crossed over, wandered the streets a bit and shopped a little, and then got an excellent supper at a restaurant Meredith had remembered from her school days here back in the 1990s.

After supper was much the same – across the bridge, along the river, but then going to the Medici square to see it uncrowded and lit up at night. From there, on to the floodlit Duomo, and then on home.

And so, after a long day of touring, I managed to knock two whole things to see from off my Florence list. That still leaves quite a few things yet to experience, but Florence is that kind of town.