One last breakfast with a view, visit from the black kitty and stroll around the property. With a very sad goodbye, we drove away from Cesani! None of us wanted to leave this beautiful, peaceful place! It was a pretty lively drive despite our sadness in leaving. As usual, there was at least one wrong turn. We had the chance to stop at a gas station to fill the car and took advantage of the café attached to get a couple of cornetto to go with the wild boar sausage and really stinky cheese (I can’t remember the name). Wild boar is really a big deal here, which seems like a great source of protein considering the rapid multiplication of the source! We purchased ours in the medieval town of San Gimignano.
In Firenze, John dropped us near the hotel while he went to return the car. We walked back and forth a couple of times down the street until finding the street number. We first walked into a school and someone was kind enough to guide me. There is an amazing cage ‘lift’ to take us to the second floor. The second floor really has one other floor between one and two. The host was super kind. The room is typical of what we have had in Italy. This room actually has four beds but we’ve been having a double plus two twin. We had a quick stack in the room once John arrived after his walk from Avis.
Our tickets to climb Brunelleschi’s Dome at the Duomo, the Florence Cathedral were for 2:15 so we had a quick turn around in the room and started walking across town. Everything is actually very close. It’s visible from the entire city, inspiring Florentines to do great thing. It was constructed during the 13th century but left with a big whole in the middle because they didn’t have the technology to finish it. In the 1400s, Brunelleschi was called to travel to Rome to study the Pantheon, then return, calculate the dimensions and cap the dome Roman style. It’s a dome within a dome and the 414 stairs to the top are between the domes. They built it like an igloo to support itself. So so worth the climb! I would highly recommend the view of the city from the top and seeing the painting at the top inside. The lower half is actually a pretty frightening painting depicting hell in a way like a horror movie. The upper parts depicting heaven. This is very similar, but more horrible, to Micheal Angelo’s painting at the Vatican.
This city is so so busy and it looks like it’s pretty much filled with tourists and less local people living life. We did the busy market street down to the river to see the bridge Ponte Vecchio housing shops. It’s really an amazing idea to build on top of a bridge! After the slow stroll down to the river, we quickly made our way back to a pizza restaurant near the hotel. We had our eye on it earlier in the day mainly because of the pizza oven. Of course we ended the evening with gelato again and were actually in the room all showered by 9:15 tonight.
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