| Florence |
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| Welcome to Florence! I vacationed here in July 2004 for three weeks. Above is a picture of a couple of the bridges across the Arno river here in town, and to the left is the lamp in the hallway of the house where I stayed. I never thought I'd stay in a building with a marble baby holding the hallway light! |
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| Here's a view of the city on the side of the river where I stayed, you can't see the old center of the city here. The house in the front left corner with the octagonal tower is where I stayed! In the back of the picture the big big brown place is the Palazzo Pitti, which rivals of the Medici built, and then the Medici family took it over later on. |
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| My first meal here, surprise, pizza! The giant bottle of water was a euro sixty, compared to 2.50 or 4.20 for a small or large cola! |
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| Here are just a couple more pictures of Florence, below are a few pictures from Rome and Venice, 2 of the nicest cities I've been to. |
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| mmm, look at all this great Italian food. The best was the caffe shakerata on the left, a cold coffee, mmmmmm. |
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| The downside is, it's expensive: this says 30.99 can last one evening, but with an account at the BancoPosta, it can last a whole year. I don't know about the BancoPosta, but the 30.99 lasting one evening is true, and for that amount of food in the picture. (those are pizzas for one person each) |
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| After all those carbohydrates, it's necessary to get a bit of exercise, so we climbed up the 463 steps to the top of that dome you see on the left. They weren't sure how to build the dome back when they built the church, so there was a contest for ideas, one suggestion was to create a support mound of dirt with gold pieces inside, and the Florentines could dig out the dirt when construction was finished and search for gold! |
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| Here's what the inside of the dome looks like, it's an amazing fresco, and when you climb up to the top of the dome, you come out at one point and have to walk around the inner rim of the dome, up close to the fresco. The people in the fresco are all a few meters tall! You can see the brushstrokes up close, but it looks all so clear and smooth from below. |
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| I also got out of the city a bit (a much needed break) and took a bike tour of the Chianti region in Tuscany. This is where they make Chianti wine. It's a really beautiful area and we were really lucky to have perfect weather for the tour, not too hot, but sunny and a little windy and clear. We got to see little baby olives on olive trees, little grapes on the grape vines and I even got to go into the house where Machiavelli wrote the Prince when he was in exile. The cellar of the house now doubles as a winery. |
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| The eyes on the sculpture above really freaked me out, and then I found this depiction of the creation of Eve pretty neat, because I always wondered how that whole thing worked out. She just came out fully formed, unlike baby bunnies and most other living things. Go figure. |
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| Graffitti, pigeons, a neat old sign... |
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| I went to Pisa for an afternoon, too. Not much to see there except that silly tower gone wrong and lots of pushy vendors selling junky jewelry, t-shirts and little models of the tower. So to make it interesting, I photoshopped the tower. |
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| These next 5 pictures are from Rome...I had a nice day in Rome, it's an incredible city, with so much to see! My friend and I really just walked around the city, shopped and ate ice cream-in one day there wasn't enough time for much else! |
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| The next 2 pictures are from Venice, also a very very beautiful city! Everyone says it's really smelly in the summer, but it wasn't at all. My favorite part about Venice was how quiet it was and how clean the air was. The lack of cars makes a huge difference. The only bad thing about Venice it that it was really humid, because of all that water. |