Fontana del Nettuno

We have been going hard on our tour now for nearly two weeks so today we had a free day in Florence. It was good to have some time to rest and catch up on the life admin chores.

Like churches there are loads of museums in each city we have been to and today we went to the Museo Galileo down on the river behind the palace. This is a science museum not just dedicated to Galileo (1564-1642 aged 77), who was actually from Pisa but lived in Florence, but to scientific developments during the 15th and 16th centuries especially in the fields of physics, chemistry, astronomy, and navigation.

We were out and about reasonably early so there wasn’t the crowds around as we walked down to the Museum. As we walked past the palace, which is now the town hall, there was a wedding happening with the happy couple out on the balcony.

The Museum itself is in a very old building and was super interesting. Back then stuff we take for granted nowadays was not so clear cut. Measuring temperature or air pressure or the properties of liquids was not an easy thing to do back then, especially when there were some deep rooted assumptions (like the Earth is the centre of the solar system) that had to be overcome.

One of the big issues of the time was navigation. In order to navigate properly ships needed to be able measure time accurately which was difficult. So they had things called astrolabes to work out positions from stars and the sun. Back then they didn’t just make a simple instrument each one was a work of art.

There were early maps of the world - one even had western and northern Australia mapped - as well as telescopes and microscopes.

In all it was an excellent museum and hard to believe just about everything in it was older than the discovery of Australia.

After the museum we went down the road to the Ponte Vecchio which is the famous bridge across the Arno River I mentioned previously. It is now all mostly gold and other jewellery shops. We battled the crowds across and found a cafe where we had a sandwich followed by the obligatory daily gelato. We walked around that side of the river before coming back for a rest.

By this time it was late afternoon and time for dinner. We went to a nice cafe on Piazza della Repubblica, had a few drinks and people watched for a while.

There are loads of tourists around most seem to be Americans but there are a lot of French and Germans as well.

Tomorrow we leave Florence and head to Rome.Läs mer