Florence and Pisa, Italy

Our next stop, Tuscany! Yes, we docked at a little city called Livorno in the part of Italy known as Tuscany. I can't even tell you how beautiful our drive was from Livorno to Florence. Green hills, vineyards, olive tree orchards. Here is a view of our future vacation home.



Don't you all want to come and visit us here someday?

Florence was amazing. Our driver in Rome had told us that Florence was like an outdoor museum. He was so right. Here we were in the city where the Renaissance flourished.



Everywhere you turned there was something interesting to see. We started off the day by climbing the bell tower of this church (I think this is the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. I wish I could tell you for sure but by this point in the trip, all of the church names were blending into one).



414 steps later...,



we had a breathtaking view of the city. Here is the top of the cathedral viewed from the bell tower.



We even watched a student protest come into the piazza below from the bell tower(they were protesting cuts in university funds).

We didn't spend any time in museums here. We had decided that instead of visiting museums, we would just wander the streets since Florence is much like an open air museum. The bridge behind us is the Ponte Vecchio.



It is known as the "Old Bridge" and is in fact the oldest bridge in the city. It is full of little shops. Here is one of the shops.



Looking pretty old isn't it? I was dying to go inside one of the apartments above these shops. I really wanted to see what it was like.

Here in the piazza by the Uffizi Museum, we saw a whole assortment of statues.



The copy of Michelangelo's David stands here. The original stood here once but was eventually moved to the Galleria dell'Accademia museum. We decided to just see the copy and unfortunately, found it under scaffolding. Had we known this in advance, we would have paid to go to the museum to see the original. Many of our friends who went there commented on how amazing it was.

When we entered the piazza in front of the Santa Croce church we saw this building covered with paintings.



As I said, it's like an open air museum here.

Here is the Santa Croce church.



Inside Santa Croce, we saw the tombs of Galileo, Dante (although he's not actually buried here), and Michelangelo. The three mourning women on Michelangelo's tomb represent architecture, painting and sculpture.



We ran out of time in this beautiful city. On our way back to the ship, we drove to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower.



And of course, we had to take this picture along with every other tourist there (notice the man in the background doing the same thing).



I did one too. It's cheesy I know but isn't it a requirement of visiting Pisa? We wanted to climb the tower but only so many people can go up at a time so you have to purchase tickets for a certain time. The next available time was at 5:00 and we had to leave at that time to get back to our ship. Once again, something for another trip.