After the mammoth effort with the Uffizi yesterday we slept in a bit today before making ourselves yummy eggs on toast for breakfast, with no sight of burnt water.
Mark says: We decided to head for San Lorenzo’s church with an attached library designed by Michelangelo and the Medici baptistry. San Lorenzo was the Medici parish church, so had a lot of money poured into it, however it’s façade is incomplete making it look like a very run down little church. As it turns out we arrived at a bad time, whilst we had a look in the church, the other places there that we wanted to see were closed – we weren’t sure if that was because it was lunchtime or a Friday afternoon, the attendants were particularly unhelpful. We were pretty disappointed at missing out on these as they are meant to be great and we had consumed so much time in the process.
As we walked back to the river, we passed through a number of markets and I picked up two leather belts for €18. We headed towards Ponte Santa Trinita to take photos of Ponte Vecchio. On the way we passed yet another church with an appealing façade. We have no idea what it was called (maybe San Michel), however it turned out to be a delightful little church with many frescoes, side chapels and dome.
We eventually arrived at Capella Bracacci within the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. This chapel contains very well preserved frescoes on The Life of St Peter by Masolino, Masaccio, and Filippino Lippi. Masolino started the frescoes in 1425 and Lippi completed them in 1480. These frescoes are not well known, however the quality of them is evident given Michelangelo and Leonardo both studied them. Suffice to say they were very intriguing and we have many good photos.
(Michelle says: This place was fabulous. The colours of the frescoes were breathtaking and we spent quite a bit of time getting up close and personal with them. You can walk right up to them and look closely at all the intricacies of the painting. St Peter has been painted in an orange robe in each scene (very Buddhist!) and little cards tell you the name of, and what’s happening, in each scene. There were some characters faces that stood out, and it was as if you were standing in the scene itself, and they had turned around to look at you. Most impressive indeed).
We continued our walk, this time to Palazzo Pitti in the hope of being able to get into the Boboli Gardens for some rest. Our timing wasn’t right though so we skipped these in favour of Piazzale Michelangelo which offers magnificent panorama’s of the city. Set on a hill overlooking the city, it offers fantastic sunset viewing of the bridges and all of the amazing buildings spread throughout the city.
(Michelle says: We got up there a couple of hours before sunset and uhmmed and ahhed about whether to stick around or not. We sat around for a while under a copy of the ‘David’ statue and kept going back to take more photos of the bridges and city vista. As the sun slowly started to sink, the ever changing colours in the sky, and across the city, held us there. Then I got stung by a bee, at least we think it was a bee. So much for my “just ignore them and they’ll go away when they realize there is no pollen here” theory. Anyway, we stayed for sunset and saw some magnificent colours. There was a lot of artificial lighting around us though which through our little digital camera into a spin and so our photos just don’t show the amazing pinks and oranges that we got to see)!
We’d had another huge day in Florence and were exhausted so we took a taxi back to the hotel. When we arrived we decided to go straight across the road for dinner to what we thought was a restaurant. It turned out to be a little take away shop with roast chickens, chicken and sausage kebabs, plenty of grilled vegetables and quite reasonable red wine. This was the first roast chicken on our trip and it tasted fantastic!
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