Fabulous Florence!

This was our third trip to Italy. We flew into Pisa and spent the night there then made our way to Florence.

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Our hotel in Pisa was only 100m from the Piazza dei Miracoli (square of miracles) in Pisa. So we got up the next morning and walked to the tower.
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Some of the city coat of arms are interesting. Here is Pisa's coat of arms.

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We had to go for a few classic poses. Everyone was taking these same pictures. The place was filled with silly tourists. I wanted to be pushing the tower over...

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Karen wanted to be holding the tower up!
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You can see someone in the background holding the tower up for her friends too. It was neat to see one of the tourist icons of Italy.
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This is the River Arno that runs from the sea into Italy, through Pisa and in to Florence. We loved the reflection on the still water here.
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Florence has a pretty cool coat of arms too. It's a red lily on a silver/white shield.

In Florence, this is the Ponte Vecchio bridge. It's the only bridge across the Arno river that survived the retreating Germans in 1944. They blew up all the other bridges.

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There was a Roman bridge here built initially of wood, before they kept history of it. It was later built of stone in 1345.
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People have been selling goods on the bridge for centuries to avoid local taxes. At first it was a butchers market, then the butchers were kicked out and replaced by gold merchants in 1593. Today the bridge is still filled with gold and jewelry merchants.
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This is the famous David by Michelangelo. He sculpted it between 1501 - 1504 from a single piece of marble that two other sculptors had rejected for its imperfections... worked out pretty well for Michelangelo!
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The proportion and perfection in this sculpture are incredible. Most impressive to us were the hands and veins in the forearm. This is a spectacular sculpture.
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Here is The Duomo of Florence. The first stone of this cathedral was laid in 1296 but the dome remained unfinished until the 15th century. We found a small section of the cathedral that hadn't recently been cleaned and it was FILTHY!

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This marble can really get dirty over time.
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This is Giotto's bell tower right next to the Duomo. Giotti worked on this tower from 1334 to 1337 when he died. It wasn't finished until 1359.

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All these buildings are made of beautiful white, green & pink marble.
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This is a copy of Michelangelo's David outside the Uffizi Gallery.
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We met a couple from Los Angeles while we were in Florence. They took this picture of us. We spent the afternoon together walking around sight seeing and window shopping.

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In the picture above we were standing amongst sculptures in an open air sculpture garden outside the Uffizi. They've got some nice stuff there but we didn't go in.
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As we were walking back from the south side of the river we got some really cool pics of the reflective River Arno. In these pictures there is one bridge between us and the Ponte Vecchio.

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Here's a picture of the Basilica di San Lorenzo consecrated in 1393. What we really liked in this picture was the layered depth of each of the building corners.

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There's a huge leather market surrounding this basilica. We read that we could/should haggle pretty hard to get a good deal here. We got a jacket initially offered at 190 euro for 105. We were pretty happy with that.
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We found that Americans got different prices than the Irish. When I finally bought my jacket, I told them I was from Ireland and did a little better with the haggling.

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Here's a picture Karen took of a mirror inside an Irish bar we found pretty close to our hotel. You can see the couple we met Ronald & Cordelia in the reflection... nice people.
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We met them at a tripe stand that was in our tour book that Karen LOVED! They took us to their favorite gelato place for the best stuff I've ever tasted.

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This is one of the actual codex thingies from the movie The Da Vinci Code. This was in the Da Vinci Mechanical Museum.

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It was really raining outside so this museum made the perfect activity as the shower passed.

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FINALLY a picture with some blue sky! We had 3 days of rain but the last day we got a sunny break. This is the Duomo in the sun.

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Seeing Florence in the sun was like seeing each building again for the first time. Everything was new again to us.

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And Giotti's bell tower... also in the sun.
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In the day light the details of the facade are just inescapable.

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We've been to so many medieval churches in Europe, but none that were designed with different colored materials. The white, pink and green marble really made this cathedral different.
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Here I am in front of the doors... the HUGE doors of the Duomo (in my new jacket too!).
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And here is Karen's head in front of the Duomo too!
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This we are in front of the Basilica of Santa Croce. It was finished in 1442 and is the burial place of some famous Italians like Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, Gentile and Rossini.
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Here we are saying goodbye to Florence by the Ponte Vecchio. There were painters all along this side of the river selling paintings of the bridge of these exact views.
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Here's a clean picture of the Ponte Vecchio (also in the sun!).
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After getting our last pictures in Florence we made our way back to the train station to head back to Pisa.

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In Pisa we had a little time to kill so we walked along a street fair on the north side of the Arno. You can see the white trucks and vans of the merchants on the far side of the river.