It was never high on my list of places to go, and therefore, I had low expectations, but I must admit to hoping that Florence would defy those expectations.

We got there by train (let’s not talk about how we missed our train by three hours because I mistook the arrival time on the ticket for the departure time!). We rolled our over-sized cases in the sweltering mid-afternoon sun from the station to the hotel, dodging the dog shit, and trying to ignore the heavy traffic.

We headed out along streets like deep gorges in the shadow of the buildings that line them to find the duomo (cathedral), continuing to avoid the dog shit, and realising that after clean, serene Venice, where cars with their noise and fumes are non-existent, Florence might not be to our liking.

There was the duomo, bright in its reflection of the lowering evening sun, and surrounded by hundreds of tourists. I couldn’t get excited. Churches don’t really do it for me, and after the Basilica di San Marco in Venice, my low appetite for ecclesiastical architecture had already been curbed.

So we walked on towards the River Arno, stopping on the way for a pizza and what was to turn out to be the best wine I tasted in the whole of Italy. It was nothing more than cheap red table wine but that didn’t matter; it was a deep, dark purple, and incredibly fruity.

It wasn’t far to the river and the Ponte Vecchio and luckily for us we hit it right on sunset. The view from the bridge was pretty, I won’t deny it, and we hung around there for a little while, taking pics, but the bridge itself is ordinary.

As we sat at a bar in the Piazza della Signoria, sipping on a ridiculously priced glass of Ruffino chianti, we asked ourselves, “So we’ve seen Florence, what are we going to do tomorrow?”

The answer, as it turned out, was, “We are going to spend three hours in a queue rolling our eyes at the loud Americans behind us, to get into the Uffizi Gallery, then spend about two hours wandering round it with audio guides, weaving through the crowds and trying to muster up appreciation for painting after painting of Madonna and Child. Then, exhausted from being on our feet for six hours we will refresh ourselves in the Uffizi bar with a £3 bottle of water and a £4 cup of coffee.”

Please excuse the sarcasm, we are not total philistines, and there genuinely were some jaw-dropping works of art in there. Our favourites were the Botticellis: La Primavera and the Birth of Venus, but this may have been because they were two of only a few paintings that weren’t heavily religious. This sort of thing just doesn’t float our boat. The outside world, nature, adventure, atmosphere – yes.

And so to Tuscany.

Labels: travel