Going With The Flo-rence

Somehow we're already a quarter of the way through our trip. Our plans for a two day one city for the first time were unfortunately foiled by a combination of our itchy feet for travelling and the heavily touristy centre of Florence. 

Starting the day with a nice look at the Basilica of Santa Croce housing the bodies of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli and potentially some other Ninja Turtles.

Making our way into the centre of Florence we were confronted with seemingly-endless identical tourist shops, expensive boutiques, American tourists, and the Cathedral of Santa Maria. This Cathedral has the largest brick and mortar dome in the world alongside a, sadly for Florence's tourist industry, very straight bell tower.

Working our way through heaving crowds we made it to the highlight of Florence for me: the Leonardo Di Vinci museum. What this lacked in primary sources and original artefacts it, somewhat, made up for with a huge amount of models made from his drawings. Although many of these were never constructed in real life the principles involved, like a helicopter idea and manned flight, make for very interesting viewing. 

This particular example was a gun deck on a ship that would fire in both directions at once thus reducing the problems of recoil. The gundeck would also spin to allow for faster firing as the weapon would not need to be reloaded with every shot!

A further, and more famous, example of Da Vinci's work is this early example of a tank surrounded by cannon. Although the interior mechanism to manoeuvre and shoot a whole series of cannon with 8 people in a space not particularly larger than Moira does seem to have been a tad optimistic.

On our way out of Florence we took a medieval walk over the Ponte Vecchio, a perfect example of a medieval bridge with shops adorning both sides.

As the light faded and the rains started arriving we decided to start making our way further down the peninsula to Rome! With a few stops on the way including Siena tomorrow we are excited not to have stuck to our plan of two days in Florence, and getting back on the road!

Danni's fact of the day: in the early modern era, stage lights in theatres were made out of a candle inside a wooden box surrounded with interior mirrors

Rob's fact of the day: Only one of Florence's pre-war bridges survived the German retreat in WW2 but they were all rebuilt using the remnants of the bridges post-1945