Well, we finally organised our Florence pics now that we're settling back into our normal routine. We had a great time -- six full days in Florence. We could have spent another two weeks and not been bored a minute. Our apartment was located near Santa Croce, a fabulous cathedral that houses the tombs of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo and includes some beautiful examples of Renaissance architecture. Florence isn't so big, and everything we saw was in easy walking distance. The amount of amazing art and architecture is overwhelming, there's no way to see it all, but on the other hand you can't help but pass 4 or 5 famous works (so famous that even we've heard of the artists...) just by walking a few blocks.
The week was a mix of seeing some big sites and just wandering. Some friends of ours from Paris--including their son Logan, who's one of Calvin's best friends from school--were in Florence at the same time, so we spent most of the week hanging out with them. We saw the Uffizi (incredible art collections, and we had a great kid-friendly tour guide), Santa Croce, Fiesole (a nearby town with a beautiful little monastery and nice views of Florence), the Duomo, Fort Belvedere, the Boboli Gardens of the Pitti Palace... Calvin's favorite site was the statue of Perseus and Medusa, Carter liked Michelangelo's David the best (although we only ever saw the copy outside Palazzo Vecchio).
But nothing could really beat just wandering around the city. We had a great book of stories about Florence, which turned the whole week into a giant scavenger hunt. It includes things like the 350-year-old mid-field marker for the annual football game between the different neighborhoods in Florence, the street where a 2-year boy miraculously survived being attacked when the lion mascot of Florence got out of its cage one day (oops), the tiny doors they used to sell wine from, the high-water marks for the awful floods in 1333 and 1966, the stone where Dante used to hang out... things that look so unremarkable you could walk past them a hundred times without noticing, but were really fun to hunt out and kept Carter completely entertained the whole week. Calvin devoted himself to spotting fleur-de-lys, which was basically a full-time job since it's the official symbol of the city and is on everything from city hall to manhole covers.
Almost all the food was great, of course, but coffee and gelato were the highlights. Italian coffee is hands-down the best, and Chris had 3-4 machiattos (espresso with a spoonful of frothed milk on top) a day. The gelato... well, what can you say? We had gelato at least once every day, sometimes twice. The kids can't even pick a single favorite, they say one right off and then change their minds three times in the next minute as they remember another flavor they tried and loved. We stopped in so many coffee and gelato shops that Calvin started referring to it as 'going to see San Macchiotto and San Gelato.' ("San" means saint, and we had seen or walked past about 15 churches with similar names: San Lorenzo, San Spirito, San Marco, San Francesco...) The kids had fun shopping for themselves with some of their Christmas money. Calvin loved everything Pinocchio, Carter found a little box for his growing collection, and they both got personalized wooden shields (they would have loved to get the matching wooden swords, but we decided that was something doomed to end in disaster...).
It was a wonderful vacation, almost enough to compensate for not being with you all for the holidays. We're glad to be home in Paris again, though (even if there's not much gelato), and looking forward to having some of you visit soon.
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