The first spot we visited, simply due to its proximity, was the church of Santa Maria Novella.
No photos allowed inside. Anyway, that's great and all, but churches have been done before, Florence. I've seen plenty of churches in Italy. They're big into that here. If I wanted more churches, I would have gone to Ravenna. Show me some new tricks, Medici.
Oh my goodness.
Oh wow. That right there is the famous Duomo of Florence. Is it a church? Yes, yes it is. However, it's definitely the most impressive outside of a building I've ever seen. It's absolutely enormous, and there's minute detail covering every square inch, and the green-and-white marble gives it a really unique style. Let's climb it.
There are a lot of stairs in the Duomo. A lot of cramped, tiny stairs, including several one-person-wide spiral staircases that substantially satisfied my personal Harry Potter fantasies.
About two-thirds of the way up to the top of the Duomo, the passage lets out into the rotunda. Now, back in October I had the awesome chance to climb the dome of the Capitol building in Washington, DC as a perk of my internship there. After the long climb up, as I stood face-to-face with the Apotheosis of Washington painting and later right under the Statue of Freedom, I said to myself, "You know, this is probably the coolest dome I'm going to climb this year. Domes don't get much cooler than this."
My dome experience had just begun.
Oh man.
Okay, Florence. You've made your point. Nobody outdomes the Duomo. The Capital's got nothing on this. We kept climbing up, and in true Italian fashion in the upper stairways there were people simultaneously trying to go upward and downward. Once all that was successfully sorted out...
Yes.
Oh man, Florence is the best.
Hey! It's finally proof that I'm doing all these things!
Conclusion: If you go to Florence, priority number one is the Duomo. There's a lot I didn't get to see there, including the famous art gallery, the major library, and the Statue of David, but I'm sure I'll be back before the semester is over. Two other major sites:
The Palazzo Vecchio
And the view from the Ponte Vecchio:
And that's Florence. I've got no plans for this weekend, but should be spending the last weekend in February in Rome.
