This church was right around the corner from our hotel.
The duomo was a brisk 10 minute walk from our hotel. It was ridiculously crowded…unless you had the Rick Steves book which suggested taking a terraces tour, which allows you to bypass the line. Cha Ching!
The terraces tour was awesome, and a little scary. You can only purchase this tour in the never-visited cathedral museum across the street from the duomo. You are also literally walking on a very tiny ledge with a 3 foot high barrier holding you above the hard concrete below.
Before we started the tour, we got to look up into Brunelleschi's dome, huge Renaissance accomplishment! He invented machines to build it, for crying out loud!
There it is, from the outside.
My man likes to look at stuff (along the terraces, moving around the duomo)
I like to pose for pictures in front of Tuscan landscapes (also on the terraces).
Beautiful Tuscany. When I go through my mid-life crisis, I will be back, to contemplate life, buy a fixer-upper and regain my youthful spirit.
The streets below.
There are optical illusions in the duomo! This was my favorite.
We went to the Uffizi, where we saw many famous paintings, including the Birth of Venus, by Botticelli. We weren’t allowed to take any pictures, except of the Arno River outside the building, which was really pretty.
This is the view from the top of the Uffizi, where we ate $20 sandwiches!
We also went to the Academy, where Michelangelo’s David lives. Pictures weren’t allowed here either (I wasn’t fully aware of this fact until I’d taken one). The David is astounding and these days, both a work of art and science! It’s hooked up to seismic sensors and constantly monitored.
"You're in the streets of Florence"! (Jersey Shore quote during a bar brawl. Sadly, I have no pictures of those).
Another one of the duomo, for good measure.
In other news, I apparently have some sort of malware on my work computer that is undetectable and renders all google searches fruitless. Every link in a search redirects to some sort of spam site, which is almost as frustrating as losing my gmail account last year. I can google nothing, so I remain ignorant of many things, for example: when Beyonce’s baby is due, what John Huntsman has been saying, why Chad Michael Murray has decided to come back to One Tree Hill, Lady Gaga’s performance at the VMAs, and the released clip from the Hunger Games. It’s like living in the dark ages.
