Had a nice chat with Robert over our 8am breakfast. His English was quite good so was nice to chat about things Italian. His mother usually does breakfast but she must be away so it was left to him – bread, jam, juice, cake and coffee. He was quite proud of his Kiwi fruit and has to show them off to us. He also had a vegetable garden but he explained that he let retired people have gardens on his land in return for a few vegetables.
From La Spezia, we drove to Pisa to see the leaning tower. We were very impressed. It is very beautiful and is only one of a number of beautiful buildings on the site. In actual fact, the tower is the freestanding bell tower, of the Cathedral of Pisa.
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| Pisa Cathedral |
The height of the tower is 55.86 m from the ground on the low side and 56.70 m on the high side. Prior to restoration work performed between 1990 and 2001 (to stop it from collapsing), the tower leaned at an angle of 5.5 degrees, but now only leans at about 3.99 degrees.
Even though there were hundreds of people there, because it is such a large open space, it did not detract from the beauty of the tower – gleaming white in the sunlight.
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| The Leaning Tower |
We then drove on to Florence discovering another disadvantage of relying on a GPS and not understanding Italian. (don’t know what we would have done without it though!). We ended up at the wrong 59 rue Famatina didn’t we!! That corrected we ended up at our hotel in time for a quick snack before invading Florence. Jill opted to stay at the hotel and have a rest so I was on my own.
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| Florence |
The destination for the afternoon was to be the Galleria Degli Uffizi (The Uffizi Gallery). Now I know that the Lonely Planet had warned me about crowds in Florence but this was the second half of September, wasn’t it!! I got to the gallery and there were people queued up everywhere. It would have taken 2 hours just to get a ticket, then I would have had to line up to get in. The Uffizi just wasn’t to be.
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| The 'replica' David |
After crossing that off the list I decided to go to the Accademia Gallery to see if we could get tickets to see the museum (and Michelangelo’s statue of David) for the morning (our original plan). No luck there either. The earliest tickets available were for 2pm. It seems the closest I was going to get to David was to see the replica in the public square, outside the Palazzo della Signoria (David’s original position before being moved to the Museum) - even that is pretty impressive. There’s no doubt that Florence has some beautiful buildings, the cathedral (the Duomo) in particular, but because there is so little open space, I found that the crowds impacted so much more than anywhere else we have been. I guess I was disappointed that I was unable to get into the museums too! There is a message there for others. If you want to get into a Florence Museum, book early.
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| The Duomo, Florence |
Back on the bus to the Ibis to find that Jill didn’t even have a sleep. She had been Facebooking and reading – guess that’s still a rest.
Dinner tonight was downstairs in the hotel as there are no restaurants handy.
