Swompdonkey

Hooked up last night with some friends I met in Rome --Emily followed me up a day later (I think she was getting a bit overwhelmed by the eternal city... quite understandably!) and David had finished his quick jaunt to the south. After a fantastic day alone in Florence wandering this splendid city, I was ready for company again. We had a great supper -you havent eaten steak until you've had Florentine bisteka- and got a bit blitzed on some cheap wine. It seems that all wine here, even the cheap stuff, is good.

This morning, I cured my hangover with a nice small Italian breakfast, and we headed to the Uffizi gallery at 9 pm to beat the crowds. The Uffizi gallery (literally "office" -named for the former public buildings used by the Medicis that it now occupies) is the little Florentine museum that happens to hold a large proportion of the world's art treasures from the Renaissance period. In this gallery, it seems that every second painting is a masterpiece. I'm talking Michelangelo, Carravaggio, Veronese, Rubens, Titian, Giotto, Pontormo, da Vinci and of course Botticelli's "Birth of Venus", which, judging from the amount of posters featuring this image sold in the gallery's giftshop, is the gallery's most famous piece.

We wandered, awestruck, through the 45 rooms, barely aware of the time. At 2pm we stumbled out into the famous Pizza Della Signoria, footsore and slightly giddy. What an incredible feast for the eyes... but, having nourished the soul, we now needed to feed the stomach We grabbed some bread, ham, cheese, and tomatoes from a local deli and headed down to the Arno for a picnic lunch on the floodway. There were a few sunbathers there, crumpled on the concrete slab. With the Ponte Vecchio as a backdrop, Emily, David, and I washed down our little feast with some leftover wine from last night and roasted in the Tuscan sun. I couldn't have imagined a better day!