20090525 – Florence

I said good-bye to several of our group this morning at breakfast. They were leaving at various times today. I’m going to miss the camaraderie.

  I resumed my sightseeing from two weeks ago. I started at the Santa Croce Church. It’s a 14th-century Franciscan church with a 19th-century Victorian Gothic facade. The inside is decorated with centuries of precious art. It also contains the tombs of great Florentines including Galileo and Michelangelo. The photo on the left is of Giotto’s fresco Death of Saint Francis. Interestingly, there is a leather school and store attached to the church. There is also a museum with several additional works of art.

The next place I visited was the Duomo museum. There were two very striking sculptures – a late Michelangelo Pieta and a Donatello sculpture of what Rick Steves calls a anorexic Mary Magdalene.

 

There were also restored panels of Ghiberti’s north doors of the Baptistery, models of Brunelleschi’s dome, Ghiberti’s original “Gates of Paradise” and models of the facade of the Duomo.

All of this artwork made me hungry, so I sought out a self-serve (cafeteria) restaurant and had some pasta and a salad. The restaurant was air-conditioned which was a real relief because the temperature had risen to over 90.

I was close to the Church of Santa Maria Novella so I decided to pay it a visit after lunch. There were major works of art to look at there. One was an early mastery of perspective: The Holy Trinity by Masaccio. Two others were crucifixes by Giotto and Brunelleschi.

When I left the church, I walked over to a gelateria that one of my cycling friends at home said was a “do not miss”. I found the wrong gelateria, though, and had melone verde and melone. It was good anyway. Tomorrow I’ll find the one he suggested.

Tired of walking and sightseeing, I went back to the hotel, rested and watched the Giro d’Italia on TV. At 6:30, the six remaining tour members met on the terrace for our own Happy Hour. We managed to finish the limoncello that Stacie and Alan left along with a few crackers and cookies. We tried to pick a restaurant that we would all like to go to. For various reasons, only four of us decided on the same restaurant. The other two dropped out because the walk to Trattoria Sabatino was too far away. Denise, Paul, Janet and I hiked about a mile northwest on a street paralleling the Arno until we passed the Porta San Frediano city gate. The trattoria was a hangout for locals – something that we wanted to experience at least once while we were here. The food was plain, but tasty. I had roasted pork, roasted potatoes and zucchini along with a quarter liter of red table wine. The others had pasta, gnocchi, mushrooms and zucchini.

Our walk back to the hotel was along the Arno. It was interrupted by a stop at a gelatoria for dolce.

It’s now after 10:00 and I am going to read for awhile and then go to sleep.