Florence day 2

We started out day 2 with a trip to the Accademia to see Michaelangelo's David. I thought the statue was very impressive ... it's huge. The rest of the Accademia is filled with religious pictures, mostly Madonna and Child paintings. Es and I got kind of tired of seeing the same thing painted over and over and over again. Lots of gold in the paintings which was something I hadn't seen before so that was neat.

We then went to the Uffizi Gallery, which holds the largest collection of Italian paintings in the world. Thanks to our concierge at the Westin we got advance tickets to go there even though my guidebook says you have to book tickets a month in advance usually. The museum was interesting but it would have been better if it hadn't been our second museum of the day because we got really tired about halfway through and left to find some lunch and sit down for awhile.

After lunch we wandered over to Santa Croce Church, which is where many famous people are buried along with lots of other unnamed people. The floor of the church is pretty much covered with tombs:



Fermi, Machiavelli, Michaelangelo, Dante, and Galileo are buried here. This is Michaelangelo's tomb:



Sorry I am unable to take pictures that are not crooked. I'll try to be better in the future.

Here's an example of all the gold in paintings in Florence (almost all of the golden paintings were used as altarpieces or otherwise in churches):



After seeing Santa Croce, we went back to our hotel to give our feet a little break, then we headed back out so I could climb the Duomo (seen in Florence day 1) and Es could get herself another gelato. The views from the top of the Duomo in Florence were great - Florence is beautiful and surrounded by green hills.







The path up the inside of the dome actually takes you around where the paintings in the ceiling are so you get a very up-close look at those paintings (see Florence day 1 for a picture of the ceiling paintings from the bottom of the church):



Later that night we went out to a nice dinner at a restaurant near our hotel called Parione. The food there was delicious and the waiter we had was extremely friendly and charming and they gave us free food and drinks throughout the evening so if you're ever in Florence, go there for dinner! Their pasta is homemade too.