Here’s how it is. I’d like to tell you something about what I did on my hols. You may not want to know. In which case there’s always the big swerve – around the post, in order to miss it. I’d been to Florence once before but only for a day or two; and WotN hadn’t. So we took ourselves off there. The quickest way of dealing with this is for me to give you my delicious dozen – the 12 things I liked best. They aren’t in rank order, but in time sequence.
1. The Masaccio frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, church of Santa Maria del Carmine.
2. The Piazza della Signoria with the Palazzo Vecchio.
3. The Duomo. It doesn’t matter how many times you see it, or from what angle.
4. Michelangelo’s David. The thing about it is: the picture doesn’t do what the sculpture does.
5. The Monastery at San Marco, and especially the monks’ cells, each one with a fresco by Fra Angelico or one of his assistants. You could go to Florence just for this.
6. The Bargello Museum – courtyard.
7. Santa Croce – which, for some reason, makes me think of Mexico.
8. The view of Florence from Piazzale Michelangelo.
10. Not exactly Florence, but a short drive away… San Gimignano.
11. The frescoes in the Collegiata di San Gimignano.
12. The Piazza del Campo in Siena – a bus ride of an hour or so away, in which you can take in Poggibonsi or, alternatively, miss it out.
There were other places, other sights – like the Uffizi, for example – but you can’t have a list without it ending somewhere.
We also enjoyed meeting up again with our friends Peter and Karin and their lovely children.
The best place we ate was Antellesi in Via Faenza. On the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata there’s a café called Il Due Fontane, which we stopped by most days. If you walk down towards the river from the Duomo and past the Bargello (on Proconsolo), and turn left into Via dell’ Anguillara, not far down (on the left) there’s internet access for two Euros an hour.