Florence – Our last day

At our last city in Italy there was no way I was going to leave with out seeing something of Leonardo Da Vinci. If you didn’t already know then shame on you, but this guy was a genius.

Models

Da Vinci Expo

In fact if you look up genius in the dictionary you will find a picture of him. Anyway, so on our second day we went to an exhibition on Leonardo Da Vinci. It was a display of real life models of his inventions and other works. A lot of the models were interactive so we could have a go and see what they did. A lot of things he invented and concepts he created works for are things we use every day and take for granted. It was a small exhibition but I’m glad we went. (Click the link to the right –>)

After the expo we headed for the top of the Duomo. This was interesting. The Duomo has a big dome at the top where you can climb to the top of the inside of the dome and then outside of the top of the dome. There are over 463 steps to the top.

Duomo

The inside was scary as. We were at least ten metres from splating on the ground and we walked around the inside of the dome on nothing but a ledge that was no bigger than one person wide and a perspex fence. Being a wuss I couldn’t help but think the ledge was going to collapse underneath me. My hands were sweating and I just looked ahead and not down and held on to these hooks that were stuck into the wall every so often. I didn’t like that at all. Then to get to the outside top we had to follow a miriad of small one person wide corridors and tiny tight steep spiraling stairs to the top. This wasn’t so bad except there was only one way up and to get down was the same small one person wide corridors. There were only a few points where there was a little more room. So you had to squeeze between all the people trying to get down when you were trying to get up. Mostly you had to wait for a group to go one way before you could go. The fact that they were pumping heaps of people through made things worse too. Oh and the security guard that was asleep on the chair did wonders for crowd control. We got to the top and by that stage we were both a bit dizzy from the tight spiraling stair cases.

View from Duomo

The top roof was on a slant so that water would drain off easily. This made me feel a little uneasy as we were so high up from the ground. Rach and I were too scared to go near the edge. All the scaffolding at the top was not assuring either. It was a nice 360 degree view of Florence so it was worth it. The trip down was no so worth it. At one point there was a big blockage of people too trying to get up and too many trying to get down. We all came to a stand point and no one would budge. Some Spanish woman started yelling in Spanish and then English saying there is no more room up top, please move. Eventually we got down but it took a while. I was glad to be on “terre ferma” (ground / land) as Dad calls it.

Orvietto

After that we headed to the markets. Apparently Florence is famous for its leather so there was leather every where. Leather jackets, leather wallets, leather bags, leather bound books, leather undies (just kidding). I ended up buying a small leather wallet which is surving its purpose well so far. The markets were huge and of course had heaps of the men trying to sell “original” Louis Vitton bags and Rolex watches 🙂

Rach forgot to mention that on the way to Florence we went to a little town called Orvietto. This place is sorta in the middle of no where and is home to an ABC (another bloody church) 🙂 This thing is huge for such a small town. It’s there because the pope and his crew used to meet there at some point back in the days. Why else would there be such a massive church in the middle of no where?