Florence Day 1

Since we had no heating and no hair drier we decided not to start the day off too early. The only plans we had decided on for today were to head into Florence and walk around discovering things to do as we went. It wasn’t going to be much of a day with drizzle and fog outside currently. I was rugged up inside with my puffa jacket since by hair was soaking and drying it on the gas burner was the only option but not entirely feasible to speed up the drying process. Since we didn’t have access to heating and I thought we were getting robbed of a basic amenity when you are already paying a total of $382 NZD and it is getting into the cooler season I just decided to run a gas burner on full to take the chill off. I also made sure to have a nice loooong hot shower. Perhaps shes monitoring our gas usage as well who knows! By 11am we were ready to hit the town with a rain jacket and umbrella in tow we got into the Citroen and drove the 20 minutes into town to a parking structure our host had recommended – apparently it's €1 ($1.70 NZD) per hour but we shall see. The roads we were driving were a mixture of gravel and tar-sealed and had the most insane view over the valley and pretty much summing up the typical Tuscany countryside you see photos of. We wound around the back roads the locals use that are barely big enough for two cars to pass and easily made our way to the parking structure called Sant’Ambrogio. Turns out it is only €1 for the first hour and then it increases to €2/hour ($3.40 NZD) so the advice wasn’t entirely true but we have had worse. Coming out from below ground we had stumbled upon the daily Sant’Ambrogio market. Continuing on for about 10 minutes we arrived into the main square called the Piazza Della Signoria that is an L shaped square in front of the Palazzo Vecchio (town hall). This square is very close to the famous Uffizi gallery as well as the Piazza del Duomo so the church bells were ringing very loudly indicating 12pm as we entered the area. Out of pure luck we ended up walking down the street past the Uffizi gallery (which was closed this afternoon due to a strike) and came across the Ponte Vecchio (old bridge). This bridge was built close the Roman crossing and is considered Florence's oldest bridge. It was the only bridge spanning the Arno River until 1218 but it is unknown when it was initially built itself. In 1345 the current bridge was rebuild after a flood and during World War 2 it was the only bridge across the Arno River that the Germans did not bomb but instead blocked access to by demolishing building on either side. It really is a must do to walk across the bridge and of course take multiple photographs from afar since it isn’t your typical looking bridge. Within the arches are small shops that jut out the side of the bridge mostly selling jewelry and every direction you look as you walk across there is something sparkly sitting in the window sill. Believe it or not there have been shops here since the 13th century. At night if you walk across the bridge again the with the wooden shutters of the shops closed they look as though they are a whole lot of wooden chests lined up.

We began looking through Pinterest as to what the best things are to do and the most common thing seemed to be “walk and just get lost”. Thankfully that is what we do most of the time in the big cities so we sent about checking out each cobblestone street. This place reminds us a little of Aix-en-Provence, although so far it has nowhere near as much affordable fashion as what we found there. We found a small shop called Legami Milano that sold some leather journals which Lew has been so desperately been looking for to scrawl down his many product design ideas. We each brought one since they were on sale and I thought I could use it for my next nursing journal since I am about to set off on a new adventure of nursing in the UK. We wandered the streets some more but realized it was 12.45pm and we were beginning to feel bit peckish. Luca & Lorenzo had sent us an email yesterday, which had the recipes in it as well as a list of a few places they like to eat at in Florence. There was a pizzeria located not too far away from us that they boasted was small, rustic, had friendly owners and did a mean Neapolitan pizza, we were instantly sold. Walking down the side of the river admiring the building we discussed how surprisingly small Florence felt compared to the big cities we had recently been to and that we really liked the feel of it. The pizzeria called L'Pizzacchiere was indeed small and we were the only people as we walked in. The chefs were casually lazing around but they were instantly so friendly even before we mentioned Lorenzo and Luca sent us here. They had an extensive range of pizzas including lots catering for vegetarian and vegans but I went for my usual with anchovies and lew tried a mushroom ham version. We were most pleased that they had free wifi so we were able to catch up on our internet sucking downloads whilst we could smell our pizzas cooking in the woodfire oven. The chef or shall we call him the pizza connoisseur brought our pizzas out to us saying “ Bon appetit” as he placed them on the table in front of us. They certainly looked a little different than what we had been having with their very puffy base and the fact that the chiefs cut it for us which we discovered is a tourist thing and Italians seem to prefer not to have this done. We actually realized that despite complaining about our first Italian pizza not being cut when we ate in Camogli we now prefer it that way as Lew likes to slice up big pieces and fold it so the filling and melted cheese stays in place. It was definitely delicious and I would recommend visiting if your are in Florence for lunch anytime soon! Whilst we were eating Lew had discovered this wacky science museum called La Specola (The Museum of Zoology and Natural History) which has a vast collection of taxidermied animals from all over the world and also the largest and best known wax anatomical collection. We thought this would be a cool alternative to the Uffizi gallery in which Lew and I don’t have a huge interest in Michelangelo's David but feel as though it is something you just have to do at least once in your lifetime ( we did see 2 copies). La Specola had a very difficult entranceway and you actually bought tickets upstairs not at the window in which the price list was outside. The women there had clearly been asked too often for tickets and was not impressed when we asked as well! On the second floor there was the entrance to the museum and the wax anatomy figures were only accessible by a tour which started at 3pm. Luckily for us it was 2.30pm so we had half an hour to look around the taxidermy animals first. I think all up it cost us €9 ($15 NZD) per person which included the extra €3 ($5 NZD) that it was for the tour. There were rooms and rooms full of all sorts of animals and the first ones we came across were the butterflies and insects. The collection is actually quite old and opened to the public in 1775 but had bugs from all over the world and showed you the differences between the male and female in some of the species. They even has types of coral and sea creatures such as large crabs from the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately all the labels were in Italian so we couldn't pick up the names of most of them or where they came from. Lew sped ahead of me and found the huge rooms full of taxidermied animals and came back to find me with his eyes almost popping out of their sockets.

Probably the most impressive animals were the elephant and also the lion which had a tag saying it died in 1758! The rooms went on and on and these animals looked incredibly life like aside from the hippopotamus in which a tag stated how the original taxidermist made a bit of a mess of it clearly not knowing what these animals look like in the wild! He/she has undergone many reconstructive surgeries to correct these errors. There were squirrels, birds, crocodiles you name it! Of course we were searching for some animals from NZ and discovered a couple of Pukekos that weren't named and also a Kiwi! The tag on this states it came from Titirangi in 1889 and a info sign next to it explained how large the Kiwis eggs are compared to its body size. We wernt able to see all the rooms before 3pm and we had to get back to the ticket office where the tour was starting from. They had a group of 15 people and they explained that the rooms can only be accessed by guided tour as the floors in the room can only hold that many people at a time and they move a lot which can damage the wax models. So like I said it is the largest and most famous wax anatomy collection in the world and was initially started as a private collection by the Medici family but turned into a public museum in 1775. The most important pieces in the collection were produced by Clemente Susini (1754-1814), the best of the Florentine wax modelers; they were produced in a workshop founded at the museum for that purpose. The entire museum shows the human body its normal state with no pathologies other than a couple of small models by another artist resembling the progression of the plague and syphilis from contraction, symptoms, death and then the decaying body. There were endless cabinets with different sections of anatomy and the guide explained that the collection despite being so old has been assessed on its accuracy to the human body from what we now know and there is only one mistake and that is in human development. The creators believed that a tint foetus was already inside the eggs before it was fertilised by sperm and of course we now know that this theory is incorrect but unfortunately the room in which this model was in is under construction so we couldn't view it. We were taken to yet another room that focused on the abdomen and the organs inside. The guide explained that this was a model based off a young man but obviously everything was wax other than the hair which was real. He didn't actually look like a young man since we were told that these models weren't well cared for a number of years and were left in a room where the sun tarnished the colour of the hair turning it grey. The guide also told us that the creators dissected thousands of bodies to make these models as when they focused on one area such as the stomach the rest of the body decomposed and they were unable to model of that. All the dead people used for this phenomenal way of showing the insides of the human body to commoners were collected from the local hospital and didn't have any relatives that would want to bury them. Its a little different today when you can choose to donate your body to science and medical students and dissect it. 

Probably the hardest things for the creators to make were the tiny veins, arteries and lymph systems in which they had machines that made tube like structures with the wax or melted wax onto thread. I cant even explain to you how ridiculous this place is especially if you come from a medical back ground. I haven't had access to this sort of thing since I left Otago University when we had labs during Health Science where you could access cadavers to aid your learning - its never the same looking at a photo in a text book. After an hour the tour was over but Lew and I were the last ones out as we just wanted to continue studying the models. We still had a couple of room left in the animal taxidermy part before heading downstairs to the museum of minerals in which your ticket gives you access to as well. This was stunning and they had large amounts of minerals from all over the world - some of which I have never heard of. The composition of them were all so different and its incredible to think that just a bit of heat and pressure and many years is the recipe. We were slightly disappointed not to find any greenstone but then again there wasn't all the minerals in the world in that small museum! It was 5pm at this point and we walked back towards the car picking up some sausages from a local butchery and also some gelato from a place Luca and Lorenzo suggested we go to (we brought it in bulk again!). We also found a place on our way down this incredibly local street that had a cool looking hairdressers and we planned to go back the next day to tidy up Lews mop and trim my fringe so I can see again. We cooked dinner at home stinking the place out with our strong Italian sausages and finished off the meal with homemade banana cake and a mixture of pear gelato and mixed berry gelato. It was of course a shame we had internet since we easily used up our 1G allowance for the day so had nothing else to do but go to bed. Florence has been wonderful so far and feels so relaxing, I know we will be back here at some point.