Today is going to be a combo post. The internet at our apartment in Florence was pretty weak and uploading pictures was a struggle, so a combo will help to catch up. Also, Sunday was a travel day, so it was already pretty slow, unless anyone is interested in hearing me go into a plot analysis of The Lego Movie or Peppa Pig. I would enjoy doing that, but for the sake of this post, I’ll spare everyone.
Saturday was a welcomed refreshing arrival after the work week. We’d seen most of the Florence sights you could see walking around, so we thought we might try a museum. There are a ton of museums to visit in Florence, but the key would be finding one conducive for the boys. We did some quick research and landed on the Interactive Da Vinci Museum.
We wound our way through the city, which is still baffling how much it is like walking through a museum in and of itself, and found ourselves at the little museum. The museum was designed with kids in mind and contained working models of many of Da Vinci’s inventions and machines that he illustrated and designed in his notebooks. The room was filled with full-sized machines of all sorts, some of them famous designs, some less well known. All around us were gears and levers clanking and cranking. There were weapons for war, mechanisms for flight, and tools for industry, most way ahead of their time. It was really cool for both the boys, and for us, to turn the wheels and crank the levers to see how it all worked. It is amazing that a single person designed all of these things, when any single particular one was revolutionary at the time. It is also amazing how detailed and precise his drawings were in the codexes he drew them in.
There were some other small exhibits about his art and about his work on anatomy. I read a Da Vinci biography a year or two ago and something that I read then and was reminded of at the museum was how he was self taught through observation and that he wasn’t confined by convention. In fact, he could write ambidextrously since he was naturally left handed, but forced to learn right handed as well. Because of this, and it’s thought for secrecy’s sake, he would start at the “back” of his notebooks and write right to left, often in mirror script. Just crazy!
The museum was really a great stop where we had fun and the boys learned a lot. We were hungry at that point and, since we were in the area, we went back to the Mercato Centrale for some more dumplings, spring rolls, pizza, and, this time a new addition, sheep milk cannolis which. Everything was delectable. Who’s have thought the best Chinese steamed dumplings and spring rolls I’ve ever had would be in Florence, Italy. The cannolis were just meh, but Silas liked them.
After lunch we made the long walk back for nap. I was still feeling good and, since Allison went out during lunch the day prior, she was kind enough to let me go out to see something I desired to. That thing was The Uffizi Gallery. Being in Florence, the Uffizi is known for being one of the greatest collections of Renaissance art in the world and was in the line-of-sight from our apartment.
The building originally was offices (that’s where the name Uffizi comes from) built by the Medici’s, I think. Since it wasn’t originally built for this purpose, getting in is like a maze through all these different rooms, then down a couple staircases, only to go up a bunch more. Finally, you are spit out into a long gallery that stretches two city blocks lined with ancient Roman statues of gods, emperors, and other significant figures. The ceilings are covered in painted panels of different Renaissance scenes. Off of the main hallway, you are led to start winding through different gallery rooms with paintings grouped by Renaissance masters. There is work by Botticelli, Raphael, Da Vinci, Caravaggio, Titian, Michelangelo, all the heavy hitters, and some of the most famous works of the Renaissance.
It was refreshing to walk through the galleries taking in the masterful colors and forms. Whenever I’m in this type of place, I feel like I could come and look at one painting for the entire afternoon rather than take in the whole gallery, but I’ll take what I can get! I saw some beautiful works that I’ve seen in books and on TV. Seeing the detail in person is astounding and, in many cases, they are painted in a way where they almost jump off the canvas.
I got back to the apartment right as the boys woke from their nap. We had been going pretty hard, but we were able to muster enough energy for a gelato run and a run to the store for a makeshift charcuterie board. After we ate, we felt a night in would be best and we enjoyed watching the Pixar movie Luca together. It was such a great evening snuggling up on the couch.
In the morning we packed up and cleaned the apartment. It is always quite a miraculous sight to see the apartment go from what looks like ground zero of a minor tornado to looking like we’d never been there.
We tromped the kilometer to the train station to catch our train. It was delayed, but that was ok. We just chilled at a McDonalds in the train station.
We got back to Rome in the late afternoon, the boys took a nap and we mostly continued to recuperate for the evening. There was a short jaunt to the playground and to gelato. I think the boys were glad to be back. The whole time in Florence, we were in a pretty touristy area, which is different from our Rome digs. Silas asked to go to a playground the whole time we were there and we couldn’t provide anything other than a large, busy piazza with pigeons to corral.
I think we were glad to be back too. Florence was beautiful and fun, but we both feel we spent the perfect amount of time there for this trip. I loved the history of the area and walking the winding streets of Renaissance architecture. I didn’t love the touristy crowds and feeling like I was constantly being ripped off. That may not have been Florence’s fault and may just be a function of how much I’ve come to enjoy the neighborhood of our apartment in Rome.