We made it to Florence!
Today we had to get up very early to travel to Florence because Angela Merkel was visiting Assisi and all of the roads were going to be shut down. We arrived at scenic overlook in Florence that gave us a great view of the city.
This is the famous Ponte Vecchio Bridge
Here’s a closeup of the dome of the Duomo.
We had free time to get lunch, and we ended up going to a central marketplace. It was incredibly crowded and we lost each other a couple of times. Eventually I got a fried rice and spinach ball. We had a bit of time to walk around into different shops. There were a lot of small clothing stores that we explored. Florence is known for its leather, and there were many different leather shops. We then went on a three hour walking tour of Florence.
We started with the Galleria dell’Accademia, where Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of David stands. The sculpture was a lot larger than I expected. It was fourteen feet tall. Our tour guide told us that Michelangelo was left handed, which was frowned upon in the day because the left hand supposedly belonged to the devil. We then toured the city and walked across the Ponte Vecchio bridge.
I was feeling very sick, a couple of other people in our group have the same thing. I decided to go to a pharmacy to try to get medication. There was no medicine sitting out, all of it was behind the counter. Fortunately the pharmacist could speak some English and gave me a cold medicine.
For dinner our whole class went to a pizza restaurant and we finished the meal with tiramisu. We then went to bed early in order to get more rest for our free day tomorrow in Florence.