Thu, 25 Sep 2003

author Tim	location A late-running train between Bolognia and Verona, Italia
posted 11:22 CEST 28/09/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Italia ( all photos )

Firenze ( 18 photos )
After getting up, scrathing our itchy selves, a cup of tea for breakfast, and getting journals up to date for most of the morning, we set off to wander around the city and see if we could find some redeeming features.
First stop was the impressive sculpture collection on display in Piazza della Signoria at Loggia della Signoria. The most famous, of course is Michelangelo's David. Sure, it is only a copy of the original (housed behind expensive doors at nearby Galleria dell'Accademia), and it was surrounded by horrible scaffolding, but it was good enough for us. We're here to take in a smattering of things cheaply, not attempt to appreciate every last detail. The rest of the sculpture there was also great to look at, and we sat right inside the veranda where it was all housed, looking over the square through these priceless pieces of art.
At the risk of duplicating information easily found elsewhere (notably once again our friend Bill Bryson's writings), Italy doesn't do a particularly good job of maintaining its amazing array of history. The budget to do so is tiny, and the amount of important historical things we could easily have attacked with a knife or some such has bewildered us all over the country. Artifacts just "dissapear", and countless volumes of history could have been written from what has just been pulled apart or built over.
We mulled around for a while, not quite sure exactly what to do. After some research, we decided to wait in the hour-long queue to enter the Galleria degli Uffizi. It contains "some of the most recognisable Renaissance artworks", which sounded like a good way for us to reach our museum quota for a week or two.
After the first hour queue, made all the worse by listening to some Texans behind us read out every last detail of the museum from their guidebook they had bought in advance (what's wrong with just working it out when you get in there??), we got inside past the metal detector (a token effort at looking secure - they guy supposed to be watching the TV for offending items in the X-ray machine was infact reading the paper), paid our huge sum of cash (no discount for me, EU people under 26 magically have less money than everyone else in the world under 26 and hence are allowed discounts though) and joined another queue to be let in.
We stopped and paid yet more to get an audioguide, allowing us a self-paced tour around the place, looking at what we did and didn't want to. We elected to save a bit of money with one audiomachine and two sets of headphones. This had the curious side effect of making the person holding the audiomachine effectively leading the other around the museum like a little dog. As such, we took turns.
The collections that the museum houses were interesting enough to make us forget the hassle and cost involved in getting in, which is quite a lot of praise. A lot of the art (almost entirely paintings, with a little sculpture for good measure) was religeous in nature, but the audioguide was quite good in that the little man in the box told us all about how the art styles developed, as we were looking at the priceless works infront of us. It could have gotten too bogged down in details, but we found the pace excellent.
Apparently there is plenty more art not on public display owned by the gallery, including some that the budget hasn't yet been allocated for cleaning since a flood back in the 1950s. That's a shame, but we have to admit that there was plenty to keep us entertained for this visit.
Outside the gallery, we went back to our favourite supermarket for some things to make ourselves a picnic up on the hill to watch the sunset. This done, we picked the rest up at the hostel and walked again up the challenging hill, determined to get to the top before the sun dipped.
We had no problems with this, neither did the hundereds of tourist buses dropping their loads to walk around for five minutes before continuing. We had a more leisurely pace planned - some bread rolls, salami, tomato, cheese and of course the rest of the bottle of Chianti to get through, drunk out of plastic cups one of the drink-vendors gave me with a smile.
And so our second silly dinner of our trip proceeded (the first being, of course, at North Cape), cutting away at bread, sipping wine from plastic cups and watching the sun leave its last tendrils draped across Firenze as people walked past and stared. Off to hundered-euro dinners in five-star restaurants wearing cocktail dresses, they weren't going to have nearly as much fun as we did.
The tripod gave us some nice night-time shots along the river once the sun had faded, and we got a few more as we walked back down the hill, our silly picnic over.
Back to the hostel for what was to be our final flea-infested night, we slept much better as Liz took the other free top bunk rather than the dog-bed bottom one of the night before.

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