Italy November 2005 - Day 4 - Florence

Florence

We began this day much like our first day in Venice - trying to find someone to take our traveler's checks and give us Euros. We read in one of our guidebooks that the post offices will change money for a reasonable rate so we tried to find one. When we finally found one, then finally figured out their system for taking a number and speaking to a counter agent, we found out they would only take cash, not travelers checks. One bank wouldn't change at all, then we finally found a bank. They changed at a fairly reasonable rate (1.22 Euros = $1) but charged us an 11 Euro commission (do the math and figure out how many dollars we gave them to change our money for us).

We were reluctant to get cash from an ATM because we weren't sure what the rate would be and what kind of charge there would be for an out of the country ATM. We eventually did log into our online banking and found that the rate was fabulous (1.18 Euros = $1) and that the out of network ATM charge was $5 (normally it is $2 in the US). This was definitely a better situation and from that point on, we opted to use ATMs, taking our traveler's checks back to the US to redeposit. The credit union didn't charge us a fee for the traveler's checks in the first place.

Next we headed to Cappelle Medici, which was unfortunately closed the first Monday of the month. We headed to the next stop on our itinerary, Museo di Storia della Scienza, which was about a ten minute walk from where we were.



An hour after we set out from the hotel, we finally ended up at our first sight-seeing location, the Museo di Storia della Scienza, a museum dedicated to scientific artifacts. Most of these are generally from the renaissance and there are astronomical, mathematical and navigational instruments with galleries specializing in Galileo and many of his instruments, including an impressive array of telescopes and Galileo's middle finger.

After leaving the science museum, we headed over to the Duomo, the most famous church in Florence and the city's tallest building. It is also the fourth largest church. The size is probably the most impressive thing about it as the inside not quite as ornate as the Basilica di San Marco in Venice (read: not as gaudy). We were surprised to learn that we were able to take photographs in the church, so I snapped a number of the inside (in all the other churches and many of the other sites, photos are not allowed of the insides).





We left the Duomo and found a cafe for lunch where we enjoyed some pizza before braving a climb up the Campanile (bell tower). At 276 feet, it isn't quite as tall as the Duomo, but it was quite a climb up those 414 steps. We finally reached the top and while we were tired, we got an incredible view of Florence that was well worth the effort of climbing the narrow stairwells.





When we reached the bottom, we headed back to the hotel and rewarded ourselves with some gelato along the way. At the hotel we rested our feet and changed our shoes (we've noticed that frequent shoe changes help ease the pain of tired feet) and set off again, this time headed for the Museo Archeologico which opened at 2 PM. We arrived at around 2:55 only to find two bewildered looking women standing out front reading a sign affixed to the door. They would be opening late that day, at 3:30 so that the staff could have a meeting.

We opted to use the time to take a bus to the train station to purchase our train tickets to Rome for the next day. The trip there and back was just about perfect. We arrived back at the museum around 3:40. The vast majority of the archaeological museum is filled with Egyptian artifacts - mostly stone fragments from tombs. They also had several mummies and various other items. The rest of the museum was a collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman artifacts, again concentrating on carved stone items and some bronze items and pottery.

We left the museum and took a bus to an area that looked like it had some interesting stores. As it turned out, it wasn't too fabulous and we didn't find much of anything, though I did pick up one gift. We dragged our weary legs and feet back to the hotel for another change of shoes and rested a bit, wrote some postcards, and read up on the next days activities.

Fortunately, there were a number of good looking restaurants very close to our hotel so we headed to one across the street and several doors down. Italian meals generally consist of multiple courses (appetizer first, followed by a pasta dish, then a meat or fish, followed by vegetables or salad, and then desert, coffee or liquor). Generally one is expected to choose at least two. We had a nice meal (though not quite as tasty as the meal we had our first night in Florence) and then headed back to the hotel room to pack up our suitcases again in preparation for the journey to Rome the next day.

Click here for Day 5.