To lessen the cost of seeing museums, you can buy a "Firenze Card". This card gets you into nearly every museum in Florence (about 72) for free, and it lets you bypass all the lines and jump straight in the doors. This is great!! There is a catch, however. The card lasts 72 hours, after which it becomes null and void and you must wait in line to buy tickets like the rest of the mere mortals. We hummed and hawed for a few hours about whether we should buy the card. Would we really go to enough museums and churches to make it pay? If we didn't, was it worth it anyway to skip the lines? How many sites would we visit? Most of the museums run between $8 and $16 bucks. We would have to visit about 8-10 museums to make it pay. Would we do this, especially in the 72 hours allotted? This is a lot of museums in just three days. Could our brains handle the input?
If you have been following this blog (bless you!) you can see that we exceeded the 8 to 10 museums, eclipsing 20 in our three days. But, we found a way to extend our site seeing for free to a fourth day by working the system. To visit the Duomo, climb the Duomo dome, get into the Baptistry and visit the Duomo Museum, you must show your Firenze Card at their ticket booth, and then they give you a paper ticket that is good at all four sites. To climb the dome, you have to get a reservation. We got ours for Sunday, the day after our cards went extinct, but because we had the paper ticket, we were good to go. Pretty smart, huh? Also, on Thursday morning, we held back until entering the first museum until 8:35 am, because we knew the Pitti Palace opened at 8:15 am Sunday morning, 71 hours and 40 minutes into our 72 hours. By arriving at 8:15 am at the Pitti Palace and showing our cards, we got paper tickets to the Pitti Palace ($16) and the Boboli Gardens ($10) and then visited them after our 72 hours were up. Pretty good planning, don't you think? So, Sunday, the day after our Firenze Cards expired, we visited the Pitti Palace, The Boboli Gardens and climbed to the top of the Duomo Dome, all after our cards expired. We were feeling pretty smug. We totaled up all the sites we visited and found we had racked up about $132 each on entrance fees, IF we had to pay for them individually. The Firenze Card? It cost us $72 each. It helps that both of us were math teachers.
This brings up a question. Did scurrying to all those museums add up to a meaningful experience, or was it just a contest to see how much money we could save? Truthfully, we knew we were visiting a lot of sites, but we were on our Easter egg hunt, seeking out art pieces we wanted to see. It just happens they are scattered in various museums and churches all over Florence. The Firenze Card was a perfect tool for us in our art quest.
Today, we started at the Pitti Palace at 8:15 am and followed the Rick Steves written tour in his book as it led us to the most important works in the museum. Even staying to his brief tour, two hours later our heads were ready to explode from seeing Raphaels, Ghirlandaio's, Titians and other famous paintings papering the walls in this precursor to the Versailles palace.
Two hours and we were saturated. You know it is bad when you walk into a room full of exquisite paintings and you just don't care enough to raise your eyes to see them. But, sensory overload can knock the stuffing out of even the most avid art lover.
We turned our attention to the Boboli Gardens and the chance to walk outside and clear our heads. Unlike the Versailles gardens, these are on a steep hillside, so the geometric patterns so well sculpted there are absent here. Still we walked to the top of the hill and viewed the palace and Florence below, then worked our way down the east side to the exit. Once on the street, we debated whether to go to an early lunch (10:45 am) or go back to the B&B and wait for our Dome climb. Arriving at the restaurant, we found they didn't open until noon. This made our decision for us, and we wandered back across town to our B&B to eat bread, cheese and apples for lunch while waiting for our scheduled 1:30 pm climb of the Duomo dome.
We left for the dome about 12:45 pm, thinking we might be able to get in the line to see the inside of the church before we climbed the dome. As we approached the church we saw line to get into the Duomo stretched down the side of the cathedral. We decided we would visit it later when the line diminished.
We killed a few minutes shopping nearby, then got in line for our dome climb. We were about 20 people back from the front. Right at 1:30 pm our line started to move and we entered the Duomo through a side door. From our vantage point we could see the entire inside of the church. We didn't need to go In the front door to see the inside. After passing through a turnstile triggered to let us through by our ticket, we started climbing spiraling steps in a square vertical tube, 20 steps getting us around once. Soon we were on the narrow balcony above the alter with the dome hovering above. Now the stairs were tight circular spiral staircases. The last sequence was a combination of spirals and then climbing between the two domes (Brunelleschi built an inner and outer dome) on slanting stairs until we reached the top. One section of the dome has only one set of stairs, so people going up and people going down meet on very narrow stairs. One must squeeze against the walls to let the other pass. This slowed our ascent, which was fine by us. It gave us a chance to inspect the construction of this dome of solid rock and to rest.
Of course, the view from the top is spectacular. We spent half an hour looking over the city. We had met a young couple from Scotland in line at the bottom with a 6 year old girl and a nine year old boy, both as cute as could be. We had a lot of fun talking about roof tops and Mary Poppins so when we saw them again on top Sally did a little "Step in Time" dance with them amongst the crowds on top. Both decided they would prefer Sally as their teacher to the ones they currently had.
We timed our decent off the dome to hopefully miss the next wave of people coming up. They left the bottom at 2:00 pm. We figured15-20 minutes for them to get to the top. We started down at 2:25 pm, before the 2:30 pm group started up. We nearly had the stairs to ourselves. We only had to stop once to let people pass.
Once on the ground, we headed out for groceries and a little shopping, then returned home for a bit before heading out for dinner.
We stilled back to the Santa Sisto Piazza and found the restaurant we had scoped out the night before, the one that had plates of mussels. It was about 6:00 pm on this warm evening, a little early for the dinner crowd. We were given a table outside on the edge of the piazza. The table next to us had a gigantic plate, 18" in diameter piled with mussels, clams, baby octopus and shrimp. The German couple were groaning under the weight of this "appetizer" while the meals the order to go with it sat getting cold. That appetizer was to be our dinner.
For the next two hours we wadded through our own mountain of shellfish while talking with the German couple at the table to our right and the Australian couple to our left, tackling their own shellfish mountain, which they ordered after seeing ours.
It was dark by the time we wandered back across town to our room. A great last night in Florence.
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