We got a fairly early start this morning—leaving the flat at 8:30 and getting breakfast en route to Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiorno, the enormous cathedral that dominates the skyline, which we had tried to tour yesterday, but the line was crazy long. It wasn’t super clear, but it looked like the (free) cathedral tour opened at 9:30 AM. Alas! The cathedral opened at 10:15 AM, and we had an 11:00 AM electric bike tour scheduled.
So…we walked over to Basilica di San Lorenzo and did a tour of that instead before heading to the bike tour.
The bike tour was our first experience on electric mountain bikes, and it was fun. The guide was the 30-year-old wife of a husband-wife team that runs a bike rental shop, and she was born and raised in Florence, so had a lot of local knowledge and enthusiasm. The appeal of the bike tour when we signed up was that it was going to get out of the city a bit (as Florence is competing for the title of “most tourist congested” city of our trip). The bikes were pretty amazing—pretty much made it seem like we were pedaling on flat ground or a slight downhill almost no matter that actual incline! There were only five of us on the tour—a couple who said they were from Austin…but had moved to Mexico City (both were freelancers—one in PR, and one a UX designer), and a lady who introduced herself as being from New York…but who lives in North Carolina.
We rode up to Michelangelo Square, which has a pretty amazing view over the city and is apparently a super-crowded place to watch the sun set. From there, we road farther out of town and up into the hills to the “Hollywood of Florence”—apparently, a pretty pricey area, but also an area that had some great views out over the wine and olive fields of Tuscany (as well as the house where Galileo lived out his last years and died). So, that was a good outing. A few little Florence facts we picked up along the way:
Bread in Florence does not have salt in it. We’d noted that the bread tasted…bad, but we thought it was just bad culinary luck. Apparently, so much of the Tuscan diet was salty meats, that it became customary to just cook bread without salt. We have had more bread since, and this is just an objectively bad decision by the local bakeries, in our opinion.
Gelato was invented in Florence
After the bike tour, we grabbed a couple of absolutely enormous sandwiches (8” x 8”…and those were buns that were just one quarter of the actual loaf). This seemed to be “a thing” in the area we were in—lots and lots of shops selling the, of which one is apparently internationally famous (our guide advised us to skip it—that, since it gained fame, the sandwich quality declined while the prices increased). Each sandwich was all of 6 euros. Tim managed to eat half of his, while Benton ate almost all of his.
We ate while we walked, as we decided we would just stand in line as long as it took to get into Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiorno. The line was long…but we were still through the line and through the cathedral in just over 30 minutes. We agreed: the outside of the cathedral (which we’d walked around multiple times already going from place to place) is wildly more impressive than the inside.
We then walked over to Basilica di Santa Croce, which our guide had pointed out while we were in Michelangelo Square as the place where both Galileo and Machiavelli are buried! That was much more off the beaten path and was interesting to walk through, although we skipped the audio self-guided tour, as our energy was flagging a bit. We wound up sitting down in a courtyard tucked back in the basilica (we had the entire courtyard to ourselves for ~10 minutes!) and realized we had not actually sat down (not counting sitting on bikes while pedaling) since we’d left breakfast. So, while we’d thought we might head over to the Jewish quarters and check out the area and the synagogue, we instead decided to head back to the flat, shower, and relax for a bit (including a short nap for both of us).
Tim had a 2-hour online webinar he wanted to check out from 6:00 to 8:00, so he did that while Benton did some digging into Hugo (hey…if you’re reading this on a web page…you’re consuming the fruit of that digging!). We headed out for dinner after that—had a little trouble finding a place to eat (restaurants seemed to be hopping on a Tuesday night at 8:30 PM!), but we finally found a place, ate, grabbed some gelato on the way back to the flat, and called it a night.
An interesting/memorable experience of the day:
Benton: the shear volume of water I consumed today—approximately 8 of my water bottles, and I only peed once!
Tim: surprising the guide by correctly rattling off her questions to the group about identifying different landmarks from Michelangelo Square: Ponte Vecchio, Palazzo Vecchio, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiorno, and the Arno River. The first three had all been covered heavily in an architectural history (final exam) back in 1992, so they seemed to have emerged from long-term memory soon after we arrived in the city.
