We woke up early to catch the train to Florence, which we missed so we had to find another train but we were happy with how it turned out and ended up getting to Florence earlier than we would have. We knew it was going to snow so we went right to work with seeing as many things as possible.
Our first stop was the Santa Maria Novella. I remember coming here with my Study Abroad group in 2009 and walking through the courtyard to get inside. Floods of memories filled my head as we walked up and down the streets, through churches, and more sights. It's a wonderful feeling to know where you are, what to see and have memories to go along with it.
The Rape of the Sabine Women(derived from the Latin root, "rape" means "abduction" in this art piece. The Roman men would abduct the Sabine women who lived close by to be their wives. )
Ponte Vecchio is the oldest bridge in Florence and contains many jewelry shops after the nobles pushed out all other merchants many years ago.
The Duomo in Florence is breathtaking. Tyson says it's his favorite Duomo of Italy so far. We noticed that the colors of this Duomo run throughout the city, reflected in some of the other churches and in the Baptistry.
The Baptistry doors. I have to let you know that many people take their pictures in front of these beautiful doors, but they are only replicas of the original door panels designed by Ghiberti. The original gold door panels are kept safe in a museum and only a few are displayed at a time. For time sake, we opted to get a photo with the replica relief sculptures. The details are still just as amazing as the originals and each panel tells of a biblical story. The Baptistery inside is amazing. The mosaics fill the ceiling and tell various bible stories as well. There is such joy that comes from showing others something amazing. I smiled as we walked through the baptisitry doors and Tyson said "WOW!!" We sat and gazed up at the ceiling, pointing out each story to each other and focusing on the details. It's incredible to think how long it would take to make such beautiful art.
Bundled up and fast asleep in mommy's sweater. We made sure that she was nice and toasty before she fell asleep. I think that's why Taryn slept in her stroller along the bumpy cobblestone for 2 hours. Bologna, you have nothing on Florence when it comes to cobblestone roads.
Legend says if you feed a coin to this "porcellino" at the Mercato Nuovo that you will return to Florence one day. I don't remember feeding a coin to him, but we did get plenty of pictures with the "porcellino" when I was with my study group. Maybe the legend has changed over time :)So -for safe measure, we took photos with the "porcellino" and Tyson fed a coin to him. We hope we can return to Florence some day again! It worked for me :)
The snow started to lightly fall down around 2pm (what? we saw Night snow for Florence!) We looked over our list and were satisfied that we had crossed off 9 of the 12 we had come to see. With train times we had to leave either right then or be caught in the cold snow for a couple of hours so we decided to head back to Bologna. We were greeted with snow and it kept coming. We knew we had left Florence at the perfect time because of everything that followed.
We loved our time in Florence. We felt like we got to see a lot considering the amount of time we had there and with only a bout of tense grumpyness all around for about 20 minutes until we found lunch- Oops- I think I pushed too many things before lunch time, putting it off too long. But as soon as we found a warm place for lunch and filled our bellies, we were ready to take on more of the city! After talking more to Tyson about it, we knew if we hadn't pushed seeing all those sights in fast, we would have missed out because of the snow. I hope I made Steve Bule proud! (I tried to remember all the art facts I could!!!!!)
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