When we arrived in Florence it was lightly raining and as soon as we left the station we were bombarded by umbrella salesmen. This continued while walking to the hotel every 100m or so until we succumbed and got out our own umbrellas at which point the umbrella salesmen left us alone and the poncho salesmen appeared..
When we checked in the hotel guy told us everything was closed the next day because of some holiday, so we went off to see David at the Accademia Gallery.
After waiting a huge 10mins in the line (in the street outside some bland non-descript building – we initially weren’t sure we were at the right place) we made it inside. It’s really quite an impressive sculpture and very lifelike; there’s even veins in the back of the hands and feet.
We also went to the attached Department of Musical Instruments which had a collection of instruments including a number of Stradivarius violins, cellos and a 5 stringed viola made in the late 1600’s. They also had a collection of pianos which showed the evolution of the inner workings from the first ‘models’ to current day.
The next day we climbed to the top of Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore or Duomo’s Dome. The Duomo is Florence’s gothic cathedral that was built with a hole awaiting a dome in its roof. This was before the technology to span it was available.
The climb to the top was on a stairway in the airgap between the inner ceiling dome and the outer roof dome. It was like going through secret passage ways (that I’m sure exist in all these massive churches) and allowed you to see the support structures holding it all up. There was also a collection of tools that were used to build the dome which looked fairly primitive - the most complicated was a winch pulley system.