Today we were planning on heading straight up to Venice. Mary's parents will be meeting us there, so we thought we'd need some time to see the city before they arrive, but it turns out they want to spend some time there also (even though they've been a couple times before), so we decided to skip the Appian way and catacombs and head straight for Florence, which is on the way to Venice anyway. We caught a morning train to Florence and checked into the hostel near the train station. It's the weekend, so we were happy to have anything with availability that was cheap. Since most of the awesome museums have hour-plus long queues, we decided to reserve some tickets for the next day and walk around town first, visiting the Duomo. Luckily, walking around Florence is really easy. They have banned cars (except for residents' vehicles) in the historic down town, making it a wonderful pedestrian zone. First, we visit the Duomo, which has a lovely white, red, and green facade (the colors of Italy), which is actually new to celebrate the unification of Italy. The impressive part is the dome, which we decided to not climb, as the dome of Saint Peter's Basilica is similar and was somewhat disappointing to climb.
The inside of the Duomo was disappointing. There just isn't much in there, like they blew their whole budget on the dome or something. Speaking of which, apparently the better part of the cathedral was built during the century before the technology to build such a big dome was rediscovered in the Renaissance. Talk about faith!
Next, we walked around down town with the Rick Steves audio walking tour. We went into a church that was a granary before it was a church, with a grain warehouse upstairs and an open air grain market downstairs. We could see the holes in the columns that were the bottom of the old chutes for delivering grain. We then made our way down to Piazza della Signoria where we saw the Palazzo Vecchio with it's replica of David out front on display where the original David used to be, the other monuments, and the Loggia dei Lanzi which is a pavilion with some awesome statuary. It was originally a place for public speaking, but was converted to a place for statues by the Medici. As Rick Steves put it, the Medici preferred free art over free speech. We also walked down to the Ponte Vecchio, the famous covered bridge full of jewelry shops.
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