Florence Leisurely

After our 'Day of Lines' the previous day, we were keen to enjoy Florence in a much more pleasant way, and with zero stress.

We wandered through some markets, admiring the fare.

And then we wandered the streets some more.

Found a lovely little cafe for lunch for the best meal we'd had in Florence up until that point.

We had a giggle at the plug-in cars...

And settled again near the fake David for a bit of leisurely time, enjoying the nearby buskers.

While appreciating the beauty of the statue reproductions in the daylight. I love the twisty feel of these statues, where you can just keep walking around and around them and feel like the story is unfolding before your eyes.

Eventually we roused ourselves to find a change of scenery, so started wandering again.

And admired the giant jars of nutella yet again. I don't think I've ever seen a pyramid of nutella jars as a window display before!

Yet another Florentian lock - the biggest one yet.

And then we crossed the river to climb the hill up to Piazza Michelangelo, which has a fabulous view of Florence.

The hill has a very big public garden. It's beautiful.

I could never have appreciated Florence properly if I hadn't seen this view.

In pride of place at the top of the hill, another David replica.

Florentians adopted Michelangelo's David as something of a symbol for Florence, since Florence was able to defeat other larger or stronger city states before Italy became a united country, similar to David and the giant.

This is his view. Not bad!

We  decided to enjoy the view for a while, sticking with our stress-free policy for the day.

Tom's trying to channel David.

Oh oh, the money belt's made an appearance again!

Oh to have abs like that...

Or a view like that every day?

We had a sneaky little giggle at the photographers with their extremely complicated setups, prepared for setup. We couldn't giggle for too long though, since we pulled out the tripod for our Colosseum shots.

And then we plonked ourselves down on the stairs and enjoyed the view some more.

Tom tried an Italian beer, and absolutely loved it.

There's a little restaurant below the lookout area, and they had a little string quartet playing. Makes for a beautiful setting.

This is the symbol of Florence (other than David, of course). They've managed to incorporate it almost everywhere.

We then went for a little walk in search of some food, and came across this. Can it even be called a park?

We did find a nice-looking restaurant with a view, but almost fainted when we saw the prices (and the service charge which was 3 euro per person), so we decided that we could wait to eat.

And we went back and enjoyed the view as the lights went on all over Florence.

And on David.

We eventually made our way back down into the city, with our stomachs grumbling, and found some food. Which again I managed to not get pictures of!

 So that was our comparatively lazy Florence day (although I like to think of it as leisurely). It's really no fun experiencing a city from a line. We much prefer walking it and observing it from a cafe, we've decided.