Florence June 11th to 16th 2012

We traveled from Venice to Florence by high speed train. We had bought a first class rail pass before leaving the USA but since we had to book seats and pay a booking fee which had gone up from 4 Euros to 10 Euros for each trip, it would have been just as easy to buy the tickets at the station.

Once we arrived in Florence we took a cab to the hotel Antiche Dimore Firenze, which ended up being our favorite hotel in Italy. Everyone on the desk was friendly and helpful and the atmosphere was relaxed.
We arrive at the Hotel a little earlier than we were expected and they don't have someone on the desk all the time. We had given them our estimated time of arrival so we had a short wait before someone arrived to let us in.

Our Room in Florence

We were given keys to the main door and to our room dropped our bags and went out to find our way around Florence . We had an early reservation at the Accademia Gallery for Tuesday morning and we thought we might be able to pick up our tickets so that we could sleep a little longer in the morning.

The Accademia is closed on Monday's and you can't pick up your tickets early anyway but at least we found out that we had to queue at one door for the pre booked tickets and then go to the other end of the building to enter the Gallery.

John had downloaded some of Rick Steve's Audio Tours on to his Ipod so once we got into the Gallery on Tuesday we used the Audio Tour - which since I know very little about art was very helpful in making sure we knew what we were looking at. I especially liked the statues of the prisoners as you could see the different stages of the carving and of course David was impressive.

Ponte Vecchio Bridge

After we came out of the Accademia we walked down to the Arno River and took some photo's of the Ponte Vecchio Bridge.

Then we walked in the opposite direction to the bridge and came across the Galileo Museum.
John was really interested in going into the Galileo museum so we made that our next stop. Somewhere in the museum I put down my rain jacket and lost it.


Wednesday we had early morning reservations for the Uffizi Gallery and another Rick Steve's audio tours. We got a little lost on this tour looking for Botticelli's Birth of Venus that Rick was telling us about only to find out that the room it was in was closed for renovations.

After the Uffizi we went down to the Ponte Vecchio Bridge and took some more photo's this time from the bridge.

View from the Ponte Vecchio