Today was our last day in Italy.  I think we were both bummed about it and just didn’t want to get out of bed.  When we finally did, Jenn wanted some Chinese food- tired of getting sub par Italian food.  We found it more difficult than we expected to find good food in Italy.  It seemed most restaurants just weren’t that great.  I’m sure that the massive amount tourism manages to support a lot of restaurants that wouldn’t survive if they only had the locals to keep them in business.

I had really wanted to get a leather jacket and wallet so I spent much of the day shopping in the markets.  I never did find a wallet I liked but I found a really nice jacket.

After some pizza and a final gelato, we caught our flight to Frankfurt.

The whole time in Florence I had looked forward to climbing the Duomo.  Both Jenn and I read Brunelleschi’s Dome before the trip and it’s a fascinating (if a little dry) book about the dome and it’s architect.  Knowing that it would save us time in Florence, we had bought the Firenze Card which is like a ticket to all the attractions the first day we arrived.  Here at the Duomo, it let us skip the line to buy tickets.  The inside of the dome is painted completely with a religious mural.  From the ground, it seems fairly standard (and it is), but when you get closer to it you see that they used to be very concerned about hell.

In the book, we read a lot about Brunelleschi’s innovations that allowed him to build the dome without using the internal support system of his day (filling the dome with dirt).  He used a herringbone pattern in the bricklaying to give the dome its strength even with wet mortar.

The stairwell leads out onto a walkway around the inner dome where we got a closer look at the mural painted there.  After walking around the inner dome, a door lets you outside to view the city.  It was an amazing view of Florence!

 

 

After we finished our tour of the Duomo, we visited the Galileo Science Museum.  It was a pretty interesting museum with a few hands on experiments Galileo did while exploring subjects such as gravity.  We got pictures of some old timepieces and microscopes.

Today we went to Santa Maria Novella church.  The interior arches change height and width to give an illusion of a larger space.  As you look to the pulpit from the front doors, it seems further away than it really is.  They also had Brunellesci’s Crucifixion in wood hung above the pulpit.

We were getting pretty lazy by this point and bought a hop on/ hop off bus ticket and just rode around the city.  It does different loops so we rode them both.  It took about three hours and killed the day.  Jenn hasn’t been feeling well so we took it easy.