This year was my wife Eileen and my 25th Wedding Anniversary, so we decided to go to Italy for 17 days in June - spending our actual anniversary in Florence. I decided not to take my laptop with me, so I wasn't able to blog while we were traveling, so I am now taking the opportunity to tell the story of our "Italy 2008" trip.
Early alarm this morning, for our early (8:15am) appointment at the Accadamia - today is Renaissance Art day. I had made a reservation for this museum before leaving Canada. We left hotel with plenty of time and reached the group reservations line at 7:50am (2nd in line).
The museum opened at 8:15 and we went straight in through the security check, exchanged our voucher for tickets and headed straight for the David sculpture - we could do the rest more leisurely after - but this way there were no people to fight. Its an amazing sculpture. The museum had a special exhibit on "John of Milan" a pre-Renaissance artist, which was quite interesting. The Accademia is a small museum and we finished at ~9:15 so we returned to our B&B to grab some breakfast.
After breakfast, we headed back out into the city - headed for the "Santa Croce" church where Michelangelo and Galileo are both buried.
Then to Vivoli's for the "World's Best Ice Cream" and a drink before heading to the offices of the tour company for our afternoon Uffizi Gallery tour (yes, another walking tour recommended by Rick Steves)
Vivoli's - Gelato
There was a minor hiccup with our reservation for the tour - my email said June 10, but they had us down for May 10. However, it was fixed and we had a wonderful tour of the Uffizi with our guide - Anateka. She was an Art Major at University and she explained how the art developed from pre-Renaissance/late Byzantine of Giotto through the early Renaissance of Fillipo Lippi and Botticelli to the mature Renaissance of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci - all Florence painters, and all masters.
After the tour we spent some time browsing the shops and headed back to ZaZa's for an early dinner. Then back to our B&B to watch Italy play Holland in Euro 2008 on RAI - couldn't understand a word and the TV was tiny but hey it was still football!!
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