Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Morning Wanderings
On our last day in Florence, we had 10:30am reservations to the Accademia, so we decided to spend the morning exploring nearby.
We started the morning by strolling through the San Lorenzo Market until we arrived at the Mercato Centrale. The boys were fascinated by all the things for sale. Sea creatures and random cow parts abounded. James was particularly fascinated by both the rays and the tripe.
We took a quick look at the upstairs food court area to see if we might want to come back for lunch, but decided that there really wasn’t enough seating for the crowds we expected, and we didn’t want to risk eating standing up. There is a difference between traveling on your own, in your 20’s and 30’s, and traveling with both senior citizens and kids. Planning time off your feet is much more important for the latter.
Next, we decided to wander by the Duomo, then head up a side street to the Accademia. We were a bit early, so we popped into a market to get some Powerade, then wandered around a bit.
The Accademia
Once we decided it was close enough to our reservation time, we got in the short line and were inside in a few minutes. This is a museum where it is important to get an advance reservation. When we were here a few years ago, we skipped this museum since we had little interest in spending 2+ hours waiting in the hot sun.
The boys weren’t sure what to think when we showed them the statue that we had come to see: Michelangelo’s David:
Honestly, they were much more mature than they could have been. It really is an impressive statue, once you get past your prudish American notions of what public art should look like.
The rest of the museum was quite enjoyable. Of course, there were plenty of sculptures to gawk at. John enjoyed reading the story of Cyparissus, where the boy accidentally killed his pet deer and was transformed into a cypress tree.
The boys also enjoyed a section of unfinished Michelangelo sculptures. We were able to talk to them about the process of creating a marble statue and it seemed to come alive in their minds.
One surprise was a room that housed a room of musical instruments. The boys particularly liked a hands on exhibit that allowed them to see and hear the difference between a piano string being hammered and a harpsichord being plucked.
There were also many more paintings than I was expecting. John particularly liked once of a person stepping on the head of a lion.
And James always enjoys all the gold found in the medieval art:
After finishing at the museum, we wandered a bit more, then settled on a pizza place, Simbiosi Organic Pizza, for lunch. My gorgonzola pizza – with lemon – was fabulous!
Our Evening
We then went back to the apartment to rest for a bit. At 5:00pm, we decided to venture out again. After an intense 4 days in Rome, we were happy to just see a few things, rest a bit, then do a casual evening stroll.
We were hoping to find some gelato, but after wandering quite a bit, all we found was a cafe that sold yogurt gelato, but we went with it. John decided that he would prefer a smoothie. Of course, right afterwards, we found the real gelato shops, but we were still happy with our stop.
For dinner, we decided to just have a tomato, cucumber, and pepper salad, which John was happy to make for us:
A lovely three days in Florence! On to Venice!
Keep reading our travel blog for more adventures in Italy!
Here are some more blog posts from this trip:
Adventures of the 4 JLs 
[…] an appreciation of how talented the European artists were. After visiting the Vatican in Rome; the Accademia in Florence; the Louvre in France; and cathedrals in Ukraine, Austria and Germany, and elsewhere in […]
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