The bells are ringing in Florence

 This morning, the bells are ringing in Florence. 

This AirBnB is 1000 times better than the one in Venice. The Twins Boboli house. It's an apartment in a building that was a wedding gift to someone from Cosimo Medici! The twins Carla and Sylvia restored this portion and turned it into an apartment. 

We are directly across from the Boboli gardens. So yesterday we visited the Uffizi, the Boboli gardens, and the Pitti Palace. 

How do we describe the Uffizi? We paid a grand sum for a private tour guide who taught us the history as well as the art appreciation details and stories of the artworks by Botticelli, Rafael, Michaelangelo, and DaVinci! Robert was terrifically pleased to know the stories behind each painting and the secrets they hold, that would have been obvious to everyone at the times they were painted but get lost hundreds of years later.

La Primavera is Anya's favorite art piece but mine was the unfinished DaVinci and the first painting by Michaelangelo. We saw both in person.

The Uffizi had some lovely art. But the Pitti palace was the shocker. There were thousands and thousands of paintings from the Byzantine Era through the 1700's that the Medici family had collected to show off. It was more intense than the Hapsburg palace in Vienna, and Robert said it rivaled the Louvre.

The Boboli gardens were beautiful and there are renovations going on all throughout the grounds. I loved the little turtles and koi in the pond. I found two small bits of pottery with pink and green art on them, in the gravel dirt on a pathway. They may or may not have found their way into a pocket.

We came home and ate meat and cheese and sandwiches and fresh fruit and chips and were in bed by 8pm!

Today is Santa Croce and San Miniato and Barghello!