Florence Day 2 - The Uffizi

Breakfast at 8, and then some sitting around. A little tired: partly jet lag, partly the street being noisier than expected overnight, and partly a real estate agent ringing at 12:30 am to suggest a house for Nicolas.

Last night, Anne bought tickets for the Uffizi Gallery for 1pm today, plus a few other places to see on Wednesday. Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance, the Medici family were the biggest sponsors and collectors for generations, and much of what they gathered is now displayed in the building that was once the municipal offices (hence the name) after the last of the family donated their art to the city over 400 years ago. You, dear reader, already knew that, but I didn’t, so we sort of had to see it…

Yesterday's queue for the Gallery looked very long (400m?). We were hoping to avoid some of the wait by buying tickets early. I think I prefer walking around to standing in queues, but there is a cost to being a tourist.

We were at the Uffizi before 12, and joined the aimless queue. A line of many Germans and Americans being managed (or not) by Italians - what could go wrong? Small glitch in that the tickets for today required me to log on, but no wifi, and my eSim (from Orange - a French company - should have trusted my instincts) would not work. We crept along in the queue hoping for a technological miracle, and hoping that proximity to the massive Duomo was a positive. Between me cursing - quite imaginatively - the French and Italian, and Anne using her mobile, we had tickets to show before time. Around 1230 the queue shrank enormously as a few Uffizi staff had sorted people by ticket times and formed multiple queues.

The Gallery was spectacular. The building is hundreds of years old, and very grand, and the statues and paintings were equally good. Roman statues? Hundreds of those. Botticelli? Rembrandt? Michelangelo? Da Vinci? Caravaggio? Duerer? Roomfuls of them. And the rooms were often spectacular without any art at all.

Walked back to the B&B afterwards for a quiet rest, then Anne went back to the 6pm mass in the Duomo (for Robert). Dinner in a trattoria nearby, again with New Yorkers beside us - but this time a young guy who was moving to Italy based on a Polish grandfather who settled in Bologna, where the rest of his family still live.

21,000steps, 14.6 km, 12 floors (Anne’s data: I missed the km to and from Mass).Read more