Florence Day 5 & 6

Yesterday we spent some time hanging around the flat. At around 2pm we decided to walk over to the Accademia delle Belle Arte where the famous David sculpture by Michelangelo resides. We hoped to purchase reserved tickets at the box office for the museum instead of going through a third party. When we arrived there were two queue lines, one for entrance with a ticket at a certain time and one without a ticket. We got into the without-a-ticket line as it looked rather short and thought, “We’ll we’re here, might as well try and check it out today.” A lady came down the line and informed us that for only € 20.00 each, she could help us by-pass the line we were in that could take 2 hours and bump us up to the with-a-ticket line. We declined, decided we didn’t want to wait 2 hours, and walked up to the ticket booth instead.

Much to our surprise, we were able to purchase tickets at € 15.00 each for the next entrance time at 2:45pm, yay! We stood in line for about 15 minutes and met a couple next to us who were from Melbourne, Australia. They had quit their jobs and were traveling just like us! They had flown west across Asia, stopping in Dubai, then on to Europe. It was really interesting to meet another couple doing the same thing as us! They plan to spend time in France over winter as the gal was able to land a job at one of the ski resorts. We wished them luck and headed into the museum.

Most of the paintings and sculptures in the Accademia delle Belle Arti are from the Renaissance period. Among them sits the original David by Michelangelo, a monumental sculpture, that has been housed in this museum since 1873. David was created between 1501 and 1504 and stands at 17 ft. tall. The statue represents the Biblical hero David after he’s defeated the Goliath. It truly is a masterpiece of high Renaissance work. We were both struck by the shear size of the sculpture and the delicate attention to detail. We weren’t too impressed with much else in the gallery, apart from a handful of unfinished sculptures also by Michelangelo, but that could be because we have seen SO MANY PAINTINGS on this trip.

We exited the gallery and headed back out into the streets towards our next destination, Santa Croce. Our main reason for visiting Santa Croce was to see the robes of Saint Francis of Assissi but we learned (thanks to Google) on the way there that the robes themselves were carbon dated at 100 years too early to be worn by St. Francis but the robe tie matched the correct time period. We were delighted to find out the basilica houses the crypts of Machiavelli, Galileo, and Michelangelo, among other famous Italian Glories. The church was about to close by the time we made our rounds so we headed home for some yummy Italian pasta.

This is Ryder now, for today’s post.

Well, there has been construction next door going on all week starting at 7am. Last night we rejoiced that in the morning, since it would be Saturday, we would be able to sleep in without being woken up to debris crashing through a make-shift three story garbage shaft at a consistent interval of 1 minute and 45 seconds.

Little did we know that Italians don’t stop construction just because it’s the weekend.

I severely hope they take Sunday off, just like all of the rest of Italy does, so we can get some good sleep in the morning. It didn’t help that “Italians” (ok, fine, fine, I’ll stop generalizing. “Italians in Florence that happen to walk by our street at 2am”) kept us up by yelling and partying on our street late into the night.

But we’re loving Florence, I promise.

We slept in, as much as we could, today before heading off to the Mercato Centrale to see what that was all about and get supplies for dinner and food tomorrow.

Four Euros and twenty cents. That’s all it took to buy:

• One crown of broccoli
• One head of butter lettuce
• Two bunches of spinach
• Three huge golden delicious apples
• Three nectarines
• A large yellow, and partly green, bell pepper
• Two tomatoes

In the market, we found a place that sold freshly made pasta. We were stoked on finding that place and picked up way too much tortellini for two people to eat in one night for 4.65 euro.