I might as well start with the single most dominating structure in the entire city, the visually unforgettable Santa Maria del Fiore.
It's a gigantic cathedral, but it's the colourful exterior that really makes it stand out. Construction on it started in 1292 and lasted the better part of 200 years. It has the largest brick-and-mortar dome in the world.
Here's the picture from the day before again, up on the plaza looking down on the city. What other word can you use than dominating?
The streets around the cathedral that make up the historical center of Florence are narrow and winding, and full of shops and tourists. Florence has a population of about 400,000 but it feels like a town. If there were no tourists, you could describe it as sleepy.
The streets open up onto large squares from time to time. These squares are usually the site of a few large buildings and an open-air market. Most of the buildings are museums now.
The most significant of these square is the one below, the Piazza della Signoria.
For a long time Florence was ruled over by a few powerful families, each of whom had their own castle or palace. This square is the site of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Vecchio family palace. It's now an art museum.
The square today hosts a huge number of replica statues.
That one on the left above is probably the most famous sculpture ever made, and certainly the most famous penis. It's Michaelangelo's "David", sculpted in 1504.
It was first placed here at the entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio, but it was moved in 1873 to an art museum nearby for protection. A replica was built in its place.
The rest of the statues on the square are all vaguely homoerotic scenes of well-built naked men killing each other with clubs.
Florence is filled with art museums. This was the center of the Renaissance art world and home to both Michaelangelo and da Vinci, among many others. One of the galleries had a display of statues of Florence's better-known residents. I snapped a sample of them.
(For some reason the Florentians named many of their artists after the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).
The city is split by the Arno River. It's beautiful, but like all beautiful things will kill you if you aren't careful. It has been the cause of numerous disastrous floods in Florence's history, the most recent one in 1966 when it left 5,000 families homeless and destroyed many pieces of art and history.
A famous bridge spans the river, the Ponte Vecchio, which is roughly 700 years old. It's lined with shops on both sides that are held up by stilts.
A tourist-heavy road leads up to the bridge and you hardly realize that you've stepped onto a bridge because the shops just continue. The first picture below is the street, the second is the bridge.
The bridge was orginally built to connect two palaces of powerful families. One was the Palazzo Vecchio, which you saw earlier, and other is the Palazzo Pitti, seen below.
When shops were first opened on the bridge they were mostly butcher shops. The families soon forced all these shops to close and brought in jewellery shops to make for a more pleasant commute. The jewellery shops remain there today.
This is the head of some guy who undoubtedly did a lot of really neat stuff.
At one point we set out in search of a well-known large covered market, supposedly full of produce, meat, and bread that would be good pickings for picnic food. We eventually found a street lined with hundreds of little stalls, reminiscent of the grand bazaar in Istanbul.
Finally we found the covered market.
One of the last things we did in Florence was search out a gelato place called Grom's. It had come highly recommended by the people on our bike tour as the best gelato in Florence (and therefore, the world). It was quite a bit of detective work to track the place down, but finally we found it.
Late that afternoon we boarded a train for Venice.
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