So we’re finally back in Belgium, after our five week journey to the U.S. We re-adjusted to the time, language, and food differences and things are back to normal.
We spent a week in Italy for our “official” summer holiday, which we can now dole out in a couple of installments. We flew via a company called “RyanAir”, a low budget carrier in Belgium that gets the job done for less by stripping services from its flights, and charging for each bag carried. Given that we travel light, and the flight was only ninety minutes, the only adjustment was the complicated journey to the Charleroi airport. We landed in Pisa and immediately took the train to Florence.
The city is amazing of course, though not overly large and we were able to walk across the entire historic center in about twenty minutes. The Duomo of the cathedral is the largest and most impressive building in the city, but the city is also filled with other churches, palaces, and museums. Our first stop at a historic building was to the “Palazzio Piti”, the palace owned by the Medici family. There are several museums inside, and we were able to go through many of them. The costume museum was fascinating, particularly the clothes on display removed from some of the corpses of the Medici’s themselves, centuries after their deaths! The royal apartments were on display, which included works by Raphael, and other renaissance masters. We had time to walk through the large Boboli gardens behind the palace, and see the porcelain museum as well.
We spent a week in Italy for our “official” summer holiday, which we can now dole out in a couple of installments. We flew via a company called “RyanAir”, a low budget carrier in Belgium that gets the job done for less by stripping services from its flights, and charging for each bag carried. Given that we travel light, and the flight was only ninety minutes, the only adjustment was the complicated journey to the Charleroi airport. We landed in Pisa and immediately took the train to Florence.
The city is amazing of course, though not overly large and we were able to walk across the entire historic center in about twenty minutes. The Duomo of the cathedral is the largest and most impressive building in the city, but the city is also filled with other churches, palaces, and museums. Our first stop at a historic building was to the “Palazzio Piti”, the palace owned by the Medici family. There are several museums inside, and we were able to go through many of them. The costume museum was fascinating, particularly the clothes on display removed from some of the corpses of the Medici’s themselves, centuries after their deaths! The royal apartments were on display, which included works by Raphael, and other renaissance masters. We had time to walk through the large Boboli gardens behind the palace, and see the porcelain museum as well.
I drank a cappuccino every day, and we ate Italian food every day, of course. After lunch and some gelato, we continued exploring the architecture of the city until finally returning to our apartment to get some sleep. We rented a room with a small bathroom attached to it, which itself was part of an apartment complex that had been converted to “hotel rooms”. It was small, but clean and very comfortable.
Photos: The Duomo and Ponte Vecchio, the only bridge across the Arno not destroyed in the war.
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