So. Much. Art.

After mom and dad arrived with Keyran, we checked them into their hotel on base and let them rest. We introduced them to Neapolitan pizza from our favorite local restaurant their first night in Italy, but there was little time to adjust before we began the first leg of our Italian Summer Vacation. Our first destination would be Florence by train, from there we would go—again by train—to Venice, from which we would fly home to Napoli.

In retrospect we should have reversed the order. There are no baggage limitations for the trains, and we were shopping limited by our return trip via commercial airline. However, we did plan ahead and brought along an empty rollaboard suitcase to allow for souvenirs.

Since I don’t have a car here big enough, it took two trips to schlep everyone to the nearby Napoli Afragola station, a local landmark, to catch the high-speed train that would whisk us to Florence, 300 miles away, in about 3 hours. I started using the TrenItalia app to keep track of our trips and tickets, which made both purchasing and keeping track of the tickets really easy. The train was not very crowded, and the ride was perfectly comfortable.

Nora and I had been to Florence twice before, so I knew that when searching for train tickets and which station to use, one must look for Firenze, not Florence. It was nerve-wracking the first time when I tried to get tickets to Florence and kept getting Firenze in my searches. Like a comedian once said, the locals call it “Firenze” to hide it from the tourists. But once I cracked the code, I booked tickets to the Firenze Santa Maria Novella railway station which is just across the street from the Church that gives the station its name.

We crossed that street and explored the Church’s piazza, where there is usually some kind of market festival. At least, there’s been one each time we were there. It was about lunch time, though, and we were anxious to find a place to eat. We had a couple places in mind, but we had to start walking. The first place we had in mind had no seating available, we would check them out later, and so we found another place to rest and enjoy lunch in the shade. It was really hot.

La Grotta Guelfa was the place we introduced mom and dad to the Italian outdoor lunch experience. The food was delicious, the service top notch, and all for an affordable price. It was also really close to our first photo stop, the Fontana del Porcellino, which legend holds can offer you good luck if you rub its nose and feed it a coin.

Since this was my family’s third trip to Firenze, we planned two itineraries. One for ourselves of things we hadn’t yet seen, and the “must-see” items that our guests hadn’t seen but we had. Our first separation was after lunch when we took Mom, Dad, and Keyran to Santa Croce, while Nora, the boys, and I visited the Dante’s House Museum. There wasn’t much to the museum, but there was enough in English to give us a history of his life and what his time in Florence would have been like. It was educational and air conditioned.

At the appointed time, both groups reunited for a quick snack and then we hiked to our Airbnb. This turned out to be an exceedingly long walk. In our previous trips we stayed closer to the city center, but when one’s party is seven adult-sized people the options become more limited. This would be the last time we took this walk, however, since this trip to Florence we learned how to use the buses. At least, I think we did. (More on that later)

Our first bus ride took us to a restaurant we’ve visited before, but by bus it is a much easier trip than the uphill walk we took last time. Terrazze Michelangelo took our reservation for dinner via WhatsApp well in advance of our trip and had our table ready when we arrived. It is, like nearly everywhere here, outdoor dining, and so we had to deal with a couple pesky wasps that seemed interested in what we had on our pizza. We found relief only when Keyran and the boys managed to trap the more persistent one in an inverted wine glass. They named it Alexander, and freed it as soon as we finished eating.

On the plus side, the restaurant has a view of the park across the street that is next to the Piazzale Michelangelo which has fantastic views of Florence. The Piazzale and restaurant are perched on a high hill on the south side of the Arno River across from the Florence city center, putting the city’s famous landmarks between the viewer and some magnificent sunsets during twilight hours. After dinner, pictures are necessary, and, judging by the size of the crowd, we were not the only ones who thought so. With photos taken, we took the bus back to our lodgings to rest and prepare for our first full day in Florence. There was going to be lots of walking, but we were starting with a bus back to the city center.

Though I could buy the tickets from the bus driver, that was a convenience that came with a significant upcharge. So, the next morning I downloaded the app from a QR code on the bus stop sign where I found an option to buy tickets, which I did. Boarding the bus, we found there was no way to validate the virtual tickets. There was no bar code scanner or detector, and the bus driver didn’t seem to be interested either. When I tried to show him the ticket on my phone he grunted “it’s okay” and indicated with a nod of his head that I should keep walking onto the bus. I continued to pay for our rides via the app, and had the tickets on my phone to show any transit police who may have demanded them, but I am not completely certain they were the correct, valid ticket. But we were never challenged, so it hardly mattered.

Our first destination was supposed to be the Uffizi Gallery, but we couldn’t help stopping at a little café for an Italian breakfast of coffee and pastries. We also had time for a couple pictures with the Ponte Vecchio in the background. We spent a couple hours in the Uffizi looking at amazing art, too much of which to detail, but it is always stirring to see in person works of art you’ve previously only seen in books. Our group’s favorites were the works by da Vinci and Michealangelo.

We paused for lunch in the café atop the Uffizi, but there was much more to do. Again, we divided our force. Mom, Dad, and Keyran would discover the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence’s main cathedral, while the rest of us visited the nearby Anthropological museum, which had an impressive collection of artifacts from around the world—including two cases filled with boomerangs—and even an exhibit describing the voyages of Captain James Cook. This was worth the trip, but far enough down the list that it waited until our third trip to do so.

We finished at about the same time as the cathedral visitors, and though we had planned to do a little shopping, everyone was tired and ready to head home, and so we ended up doing only a little shopping—one store. A simple home-cooked dinner and watching the Olympic Opening ceremonies were our evening entertainment. It was an Italian broadcast, of course, so we had the volume down and provided our own commentary. Reactions were mixed, except that we all agreed the ceremony was too long. This time just relaxing together in the evenings was some of the most enjoyable moments of my parents’ visit to Italy, at least they were for me.

 In our first two trips to Florence, Nora and I had made increasing levels of preparatory plans. There is no shortage of things to see, even if one is shut out from the main attractions. But even with the weeks of advance planning needed to purchase tickets to the Uffizi Gallery, we hadn’t yet cracked the code for tickets to the Galleria dell’ Academie, where Michaelangelo’s David can be seen, until this trip. It turns our, the third time (and planning months in advance) is a charm.

Even with the months of advance planning, entry times for the Gallerie were few and we had to settle for what we could get and plan the rest of our Florence experience around it. 0915-0930 was our entry time that Saturday morning, which was good. I’ve found that if you can get an early start, you can beat most of the crowds of locals to just about anything. They stay out too late to take advantage of the earlier entry times. So it was that we left our lodging at 0830 for the walk to the Galleria.

This was the high point for Mom, who described her emotion upon seeing the enormous statue of David as “gob smacked.” I confess a similar reaction. The size of the statue was unexpected and arresting. I also discovered that Michaelangelo carved it from only one piece of marble, a slab that other sculptors had rejected as unusably flawed—an inferiority that makes the statue’s preservation difficult. The level of detail and realism is so striking that it is little wonder that it is one of the most photographed statues in the world. I took quite a few of my own, but it didn’t even occur to me to get a picture of me or any of my family in the frame. It somehow seemed inappropriate.

The “unfinished” statues in the hall preceding David’s atrium were also fascinating in how they seemed to be humans emerging from rock, making it easy to believe that Michelangelo “saw the angel in the marble and carved until [he] set him free.” We spent more than two hours in this Galleria, the smallest in terms of the number of works displayed of all the art museums we have seen or would see, about as much as we spent in each of the others, yet it seemed perfectly proportional.

On the way to lunch we stopped to take a spin on a carousel, but not just any carousel. The historic antique carousel of the Picci Family in the Piazza della Republica is over 100 years old, beautiful, and a nice place to sit in the shade after a long, hot walk.

We arrived for lunch at Antica Porchetta Granieri, the place that was too busy for us on day one, and were pleased to find enough seats for us to enjoy our sandwiches in the small, air-conditioned indoor dining area. The proprietors cut the meat for our lunch from the roasted pig in the window facing the street and served it in amazing combinations of sauce and toppings on rolls freshly baked in a nearby bakery. I might go back to Firenze again just to get another of their sandwiches.

While we were at the restaurant, Mom realized she’d left her phone at the Galleria dell’ Academie. So, mom and dad went back to get it—which is another story in itself—and we set a location to rendezvous later after some shopping. It was Ponte Vecchio, we agreed to meet up at the Ponte Vecchio.

Because from there it’s an easy walk to the Palazzo Pitti where there is so much medieval art that it can be overwhelming. Dutch masters, Italian masters, Italian masters inspired by Dutch masters, we saw Rubens, Caravaggio, Raphael, Botticelli, and on and on. It is an amazing collection. Wearied by a long day of walking, though, we hurried through it, spending only about 90 minutes in the exhibits before sitting down for coffee and snacks in the Palazzo’s courtyard café. There we decided to head home by way of a gelateria rather than explore the Boboli Gardens, and were safely in our Airbnb by 5:30 where we enjoyed our homemade dinner and relaxing conversation in our last night in Florence.

The next morning, we got to the train station well before our scheduled train out of Florence, giving us time to explore the station while being serenaded by a man playing the piano. He was playing American standards, which was odd to hear while shopping in Italian stores. Dad wanted a pastry and water which when I ordered it for him was told it came with coffee. Italy can be amazing.

Prossima fermata: Venezia.