Day of Museums

Miles from Home - 5473.6 miles
Firsts / Highlights - City exploring.
Miles Ridden - 0.0 miles
Vertical Feet - 0 ft
Route - No ride today (or the next couple of days).
People - Just me

This post is from May 24, 2009.



I had a day of playing hard-core tourist today. I don't get as much from that as actually DOING something, but when you have 48 hours in a city like Florence, you kind of need to just collect trophies. My trophies were:

The Academia (home to David - you may recognize the shadow of his rather familiar pose).

The Uffizzi Gallery - Museum of Italian renaissance art.

DaVinci Museum - This was not an A-list attraction, but it looked interesting, so I went in. This was a collection of models built from DaVinci's drawings. They were not functional, but they were 3-dimensional and helped me visualize what Leonardo had in mind. It is so impressive to realize how far his concepts were ahead of his peers ability to create them.

Piazza della Signoria - center of historical Florence and home of a good number of statues and scale replicas.

Pitti Palace - just took a quick walk along the front. It was too big to take on with the available time.

Santa Croche - Tombs of Michelangelo and Dante.

Il Duomo - The famous domed chuch. It was built hundreds of years before the design and engineering capability existed to built a dome, but they knew it would eventually be possible, so the built it and left it uncovered for a couple of centuries.

Ponte Vecchio - a bridge built in 1345 lined with jewelry shops across the Arno River.

I decided to ship home about 7 pounds of things that I can live without. The weight of my lugguge getting from city-to-city was becoming a problem. I felt pretty good about finding 7 pounds of excess until I learned the cost for shipping. It was about $100 for 7-day delivery. I didn't need it there in 7 days, but that was the least expensive option available from the fairly rare shipping company that I found. Ouch.

Time to lug my bike and slightly lighter backpack to the train station. Heading to Siena for the next week.


Visualizza Siena in una mappa di dimensioni maggiori