On Foot in Florence

Here on the streets of Florence we can hear English spoken all around, unlike in Naples and Sicily where we came upon very few other English-speaking travellers. The streets are also cleaner, the buildings in better repair and the traffic more organised.

We’ve bought a ‘PassePartout’ family pass to the Uffizi (which also covers the Pitti Palace and the Boboli Gardens, which we are near). This gives us unlimited access to all three sites for a year for €100 between us (plus an unlimited number of children, but unfortunately, only if they’re under 18). It sounds like a lot of money, but just to get into the Uffizi is €20 a time each and this way we will be able to pop in and see a few paintings whenever we feel like it.

We went into a tourist office earlier to ask about the card, but it turned out we knew more about it than the tourist officer did. I told her that we would be here for three weeks and was there anything else we should know about? Almost as an afterthought she told us about three museums that are free tomorrow. I asked if they wouldn’t be terribly overcrowded, being free, but she said that no, they wouldn’t as not many people knew about it. (Possibly because no one has told them).

Visited Santa Maria Novella this afternoon. Some fabulous frescoes there, but we are going to try and space the churches out so we don’t get too church-weary.

I have two more items to add to my list of essentials to take away when travelling – string and pegs. It turned very windy overnight and Mark was woken up in the small hours by the sitting-room shutters blowing open. They don’t stay in place when closed, and don’t stay in place when open, but all solved with a length of string (the trouble is the ball we’ve bought has 199 more metres on it that we may not need).

The pegs are to secure washing suffiently well in all wind conditions to be confident of it staying on the line rather than ending up in a ground floor garden (not much washing hanging in the street here). I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that pegs, like knives, seem to diminish as time goes on. There are 10 pegs in this Airbnb apartment, three knives, but six spoons and forks.

Incidentally, Santa Maria Novella is the venue where, in 2017, Theresa May set out her vision to the EU on the role of the UK post-Brexit. It was also where Galileo was accused of heresy for saying that they Earth went round the sun, rather than the other way round.