Florence

It will be somewhat hard to write about Florence because our days were jam packed so not only is there a ton to write about, but I also didn't do any of the writing at the time. All 3 days we left our adorable bed and breakfast by 9am and came home somewhere around 10 or 11Pm. Our B and B was a 20 minute bus ride and a 10 minute uphill walk away from the city. This was awesome because it gave us peace and quiet and a great view, but it meant we packed for the whole day and just stayed in the city until it was time to go to bed.

Florence is an incredible, exciting city. We bought the Firenze card (Firenze is how you say Florence in Italian) which gave us free entrance to many of the city's millions of museums for 72 hours. I think we packed enough in that it was well worth it. The first day we did a bike tour of the city because we figured that would be a good way to see the main sights, get a good feel of how to get around the city and learn some of the history. It did all of the above, and gave us gelato! Our guide was great and I learned a ton about the city and the family that ruled the city for many hundreds of years, the Medici family.  The Medici family was behind most of the buildings that we visited and much of the artwork that we saw. I'll just list the places we went and give little descriptions. Otherwise this post will be waaaaay too long for anyone to enjoyably read.

Thursday
Arrived in Florence. We almost just camped out in our B and B in the evening but we decided to go into the city to get our bearings. We walked around, saw some churches, saw the church....the Cathedral de Santa Maria del Fiore....and then got dinner at a nice place on piazza Della republica. Since it was our first night in Italy, we just had to follow dinner with some gelato....of course. we ate it while sitting by palazzo vecchio while admiring the many statues of the square's  'open air museum', then we found our bus stop and headed "home".