We woke up at dawn and took my first high-speed train to Florence, averaging 246 km/hr (about 150 mi/hr) straight from Rome to Florence's Santa Maria Novela station. Fun fact: This was our first European train experience (either separately or together, unless you count a quick jaunt from St. Albans just 35 minutes south into London in 2014. I was giddy to find out these trains have trolley carts with newspapers and little snack bags, Hogwarts Express style. (Ryan said I shouldn't shout that comparison too loudly.) For only $25 each, we were delivered--fed, watered, and caffeinated--to northern Florence in only an hour and a half.
Lastly, I should add that Ryan wrote all the notes for these Florence posts, so I'm going off his recollections. He literally wrote:
- Frecciarossa train
- Termini to Santa Maria Novela
- 91 minutes
- So fancy
So...I think I'm supposed to add here that it was a "so fancy" train experience. We had little wooden tables to work off and everything.
We started off at the Bargello, a former palace, barracks, and prison. The courtyard and architecture reminded me pretty strongly of the Wall's main keep in Game of Thrones. (Ryan doesn't agree with this comparison.) Built in 1255, it's now the oldest public building in the city and served as a model for the Palazzo Vecchio, or Florence's town hall. (More on Palazzo Vecchio another day.) Today, the Bargello is an art museum featuring sculptures from well-known artists such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Bernini, and even the bronze door panels submitted by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi in a competition to decorate Florence's Duomo baptistery in 1401. It was this competition (which Ghiberti won) that kickstarted the Renaissance.
We wandered around Florence, including the Ponte Vecchio--the city's most well-known bridge, and its oldest. Although the rest of the bridges leading across the Arno are almost exact replicas of their originals, they were all built after WWII; the Nazis set off explosives on every bridge except the Vecchio to prevent the Allies from entering the city. (Rumor has it that Hitler asked that the Vecchio be preserved because it was his favorite bridge; he even had special windows added in its hidden corridor to offer a perfect view of the Arno, with Oltrarno and Firenze/Florence on either side.)
We sat in a square outside Pitti Palace for lunch, where I made the mistake of ordering a sampler of Tuscan crostini. I was two bites into one that was covered in an inch-tall layer of brown goo before telling Ryan that it was like a spreadable meatball. He looked like he was battling with himself for about three seconds before saying, "You know that's liver pâté, right?" (Ryan ended up finishing that crostini, and neither of us were able to stomach the one covered in lardo.)
We headed through the Pitti Palace's courtyard and up into Boboli Gardens, which were purchased by the Medici when Eleonora asked for a "modest garden" to roam on sunny days. Fun fact: instead of a modest garden, she got an 11-acre plot of mazes, gazebos, ivy arches, ponds, and a damn mansion at the top of one of the most picturesque hills in the city. We wandered aimlessly through the gardens for over an hour, finally ending up at their peak--a point overlooking the Tuscan hills in all their splendor, with the Duomo and Florence's many domes and towers far below.
And it was the most impressive of these domes that we visited next: the Duomo itself, one of the greatest architectural feats in history, and a creation of Brunelleschi himself.
Side note and shout-out to Ryan for being even more organized than I am. He mastered the planning of this honeymoon to such a degree of detail that we've shown up at every museum, church, or scenic view and he's pulled scheduled tickets, barcodes, reservation histories, and whatever else out of his pocket like it's the only thing he's had to worry about this past year. I don't know how he did it. He's even surprised himself a few times with his planning prowess; we arrived in Venice yesterday before finding out that he'd already gotten us two three-day water taxi passes to get around the city at reduced rates. He sort of shrugged and was like, "Huh, guess I knew what I was doing."
The moment I saw the line to climb the Duomo's famous dome (famous for many architectural reasons including interlocking bricklaying styles, building a smaller dome inside the other and placing staircases between the two layers for pedestrian access, and turning an octagonal structure into an elliptical dome), I pulled a Derek Bodford and darted into line before even asking Ryan our plan of attack. He just laughed at me and kept on walking to the complete opposite side of the (gargantuan) building, where he'd already gotten tickets to enter a priority access line. We were in within minutes (rather than hours), and 40 floors later were on top of the world, looking down at Florence from a bird's eye view. Even the top of the Boboli Gardens looked small in the distance.
After spending an hour in a cramped spiral staircase built in early-ass times (we can't remember when, but sometime around the 1430s), we got as far away from the touristy Duomo plaza as we could, took a deep breath and drank a beer, and headed on back for a climb up the Duomo's bell tower. This bell tower is probably only a story or two shorter than the dome, but offers small respites during the climb in the form of entire levels of open air, huge church bells, and wandering pigeons.
So in the space of three hours--between the gardens, the cupola, and the bell tower--we climbed 82 floors. And even if our legs weren't complaining that evening, they screamed with all their might the next morning.
We ended the day at a traditional Florentine restaurant, where we tried the local delicacy: T-bone steak, somehow prepared in some fancy way that we couldn't understand thanks to language barriers. But it was delicious, and we ended the day exhausted (thanks to 4-5 hours of sleep the night before in a rowdy Trastevere) but happy.