Day 10 - Florence

            After our experience with a forgetful Italian tour guide in Rome, Lara decided a reminder call to our tour guide for the Uffizi would be appropriate.  Unbelievably, he was in Rome and would miss our appointment for the morning.  Lara felt like she was relieving her mission all over with cancelled appointments and flaky contacts.  Lucky for use we had the Florence pass that would get us into the Uffizi without the line so we headed out anyway and rented an English audio guide and gave ourselves our own tour of the museum.  It was general conference Sunday this day so we gave ourselves a church “bye” with promises to listen to all the talks when we got home.  The Uffizi is one of the best art museums in all of Italy.  We easily spent 2 hours in there enjoying the art and gratefully it wasn’t extremely crowded.

            It was a double dose of art museums today as after the Uffizi we headed to the Pitti Palace.  To get there we had to cross the Ponte Vecchio, however, because it was Sunday many of the shops were closed. 

We paused to look at all the locks of love that had been put on the bridge gate and locked forever (until the city has to cut them off for the next round of tourists, because there are too many). 

Once again it was our good fortune to go to the very front of a LONG line.  It was free day at the Pitti, but lucky for us because of our passes and Lara’s Italian we made our way to the front.  In Italy especially, lines are optional, and if you waste your time in line, there are plenty of others who just elbowed their way to the front.  Today we did just that.  The Pitti palace was amazing.  We saw lots of Rubens, Titian, Caravaggio, Lippi and other well-known painters.  After a couple of hours of art we exited into the amazing Boboli Garden that seemed to go on forever.  With a bit of huffing we made it to the top of the hill and were rewarded with an over look of the Tuscan countryside.

Boboli Gardens

Countryside from the top of the Boboli Gardens

            Lunch today was at a tasty pizzeria.  Not as good as the pizza we had in Naples, but the second best pizza we had on our trip.  It was crowded which was a sure sign that it was good.  Lucky for us we found a very little round table to squeeze the 8 of us around.

            After lunch we enjoyed a short walk around the Oltrarno neighborhood.  The Santo Spirito church was closed so we made our way to the Brancaccio Chapel. We enjoyed looking at the 3-sectioned frescos by Masaccio.  It was comfortable to sit down on the steps, inside the chapel and on the benches and just relax for a minute.  After all our art sight seeing today it was time for gelato.  We found a nice gelateria located near the Ponte Vecchio.

            On our way back to our hotel and central Florence we decided to take advantage of our Florence museum pass and see a Picasso exhibit that was in town.  It was fun to look at such dramatically different art than what we had been seeing thus far in Italy.  We also took a quick peak at the Orsanmichele Church.  It was fun walking down the main shopping drag in Florence and seeing all the fancy people out for an evening of strolling, window shopping, and eating.           

            We actually had a little bit of time before it would be dinner time, so a few of us found a laundry mat to catch up on some laundry and write our missionaries.  The Brunkens, Grahams, and we all have missionaries out right now so we needed to get our letters done.  It was nice to have underwear that was dried in a dryer and not on a string in the bathroom.

            After dinner that night we found an all natural gelateria right by the duomo.  We are now pretty much expecting to have gelato twice a day.