Back Into the Frying Pan - The Post-Firenze Letdown

All I can say is I absolutely LOVED Florence much, much more than I thought was possible. So far its my 2nd favorite city I've visited in Italy behind Lucca. Carin and I took off around 8pm on Friday night and got to Firenze around 10pm, found our hotel promptly, slept like logs, and stayed until Sunday afternoon around 1pm when we caught a train back to Roma. We weren't there for very long, but we did a lot in just a little time. Now its Monday and I have a midterm review tomorrow, so there's a long night and a lot of work ahead. But enough about me, let's talk more about us in Firenze.

On Saturday we got up bright and early to get me to the Duomo around 8:30am. The early the better in terms of beating the crowds. We had planned that I would be the one to make the almost 500 stair climb to the top of Bernini's masterpiece. This cathedral is very famous in that Bernini used a double-dome construction method that leaves a space between the inner dome and the outer dome, through which a series of stairs take you to the top.

The climb to the top was VERY interesting...and not for the clausterphobic. The pic here shows what size most of the passages were. Essentially you climb up a series of spiral and straight stairs until you get up the side of the building to the base of the dome. Near the base of the dome you are brought back inside the building and are able to look down into the church itself. The fact that there are not many people in this pic is because the church had not yet opened to tourists for the day. Quite the view.

After being brought inside the building and then back into the dome itself, you go up some more narrow passages and start to really notice the dome slanting around you. In the final stretch to the cuppola of the dome, the straight stairs turn from going around the dome to going directly up the dome...sort of a ladder/stair to start with that turns into a real stair as you keep climbing.

Of course, once you get to the top of the dome, it is one heck of a view of the city. I haven't yet put together my photomontages of this, but here are a view spot photos I took while up there that really give you a sense of being "on top" of Florence. It was truely awesome.

After descending the Duomo, Carin and I were off to check out a few more things around town. Another big highlight was visiting the Basilica of Santa Croce, who's interior, if I am to be honest, I liked quite a bit more than the interior of the Duomo. Unfortunately the main apse was covered with scaffolding (you can kind of see it in this photo) so I didn't get a good view, but the arches, ceiling and general "decor" of the interior was wonderfully simple, unlike many of the extra-gaudy basilicas I've been to so far.

Attached to the Basilica were a series of small cloister courtyards that were fairly unremarkable but kind of nice to visit.

We did a lot of walking around town looking at exteriors of buildings, getting familiar with Florence in general. The last place that really sticks out from the trip was the Ponte Vecchio, a medieval bridge-turned jewelry shopping district and Europe's oldest segmental arch bridge (a segmental arch is a circular arch in which the inner circle ("intrados") is less than a semicircle). I found the bridge not particularly interesting because of its arches or its age, but because of the way in which its been built upon and converted into a sort of outdoor mall. This pic shows a little detail of how when they ran out of room on the bridge itself for a building, they just kept building and "saddlebagged" them over the side. Talk about no seismic codes...I'm pretty sure than in even in Rome today building codes wouldn't allow this kind of thing, but its cool that it still exists from antiquity.
As I said it was a busy couple of days and we did a lot more walking around and looking than I have mentioned here, but this one's getting long enough anyway ;-). Talk to you soon.