Italy Day 7 - Firenze

Another day but much more relaxing. We had about a 3 hour uneventful drive from Rome to Florence. Italy is very hilly and the other thing I notices was houses are scattered through-out the country side versus all centered around a church as in Spain. This time we stayed on the out side of town so after checking in we took the Bus into florence. Great way to do it, easy drive to the hotel and let someone else drive the streets to get into town. Once in town we headed over to the Duomo which is a church type dwelling in the center of florence. Very different architecture than what we have seen so far. More tile accents on the outside. After checking out the cathedral we headed to the Galleria dell Academia. This was

interesting. You could easily miss the entrance its just down a not so interesting street off the cathedral with a simple door nothing ornate about the entry. But this is where Michaelangelos David is housed, and not sure what I was expecting but after seeing tones of statues I wasn't expecting what it was. It was gigantic, whats amazing is you can get real close to it and looking at him his feet look huge yet they are suppose to be proportional. It is a really big statue. Another neat thing in this gallery was other works by Michaelangelo that were unfinished. You could really see how he works the marble, it is quite amazing. Oh and I guess he was 29 when he created the David statue, wow very ambitious. Anyway they dont allow pictures in the gallery so as we walked toward the river they had a copy made out of plaster so I've posted that one. So after that we went over to the river and saw some more buildings and the Ponte Vecchio which is a bridge of stores over the river. Kinda neat, I must say florence has a unique amount of stores. Well that was basically our day today not super exciting. Our friends Jamie and Dawn showed us a picture of the bathroom in their hotel, apparently the toilet and the shower share the same space. I will have to see about getting the picture from them on that one. It was definitely unique. So the last highlight of the evening was dinner, I forgot to mention for some reason fall decided to show up and it was very very cold today so we found an indoor restaurant that apparently is mostly reservations but they had a table if we could be out by 9. Well it was 7 when we got there

so 9 wouldn't be an issue, guess some people stay awhile. Anyway this was a great little place with every table taken and a menu lots of italian stuff. Joe wanted fish and they had Tripe on the menu, i thought it was fish Jamie said it was stomach well we got it anyway. And yup it was stomach but it was actually very good. It had the texture of calimari but the sauce was superb. Anyway beside that special dish we had Lasagna which was wonderful and a chocolate torte for dinner. I had wanted to get the Florentine steak but it was 1.5 kilos so too much for one person I'm told and no one wanted to share. Guess its a Porterhouse type steak. So that was our dining adventure for the evening. Joes cousin asked if we had had gelato yet and I guess i forgot to mention we did, joe got some pistachio the other day. Its crazy to look at the piles of gelato these shops have and boy is it yummy. Tomorrow we head to Venice, looking forward to another nice easy day.