The bell tower of Florence Cathedral is considered to be the most beautiful in Italy. I climbed to the top without Mark today as he is still under the weather.

Although called Giotto’s tower, he died three years after building had begun and work was continued by Andrea Pisano, Alberto Arnoldi and Francesco Talenti, who is praised for his design of the large openings near the top, which give the tower a light feel.

The bell tower is slightly shorter than the dome (85m to the dome’s 114m) and has slightly fewer steps to climb (414 compared to 463 in the dome) but the views are just as good. You can also see the surroundings from four levels compared to the Dome’s one level. However, if you miss out the dome, you miss out on the frescoes inside the dome too.

The baptistry, built between 1059 and 1128, is one of the oldest buildings in the city. It used to be rumoured that it was Roman in origin, but this has been found not to be the case, although some of the stones were taken from earlier buildings.

The baptistry is best known for its bronze doors, in particular a set by Lorenzo Ghiberti, based on stories from the Old Testament and referred to by Michelangelo as ‘Gates of Paradise.’

The panels that I photographed today are only copies. The originals were substituted in 1990 and since then have undergone restoration after accumulating at least four centuries’ worth of dirt and grime. Some of the originals are on view in the Duomo Museum, which I am hoping to get along to tomorrow.

The mosaics inside the Baptistry are magnificent, but I would have preferred the mosaic artists from the thirteenth century to have placed them lower down, where they could be viewed more easily.

To build an octagonal baptistery was fairly usual at the time. Apparently the eight comes from the six days of creation + one day of rest + a day of re-creation after the act of baptism.

Such was the faith thirteenth century Florence had in the future, that its new Cathedral was designed with a hole in the roof, in the belief that the knowledge to build a dome to cap the building would be become available at a later date.

While work on the Cathedral was started in 1296, work on the dome by one Filippo Brunelleschi was only begun in 142o. The brief was to build a free-standing dome (flying buttresses were seen as Gothic and unattractive) higher and wider than anyone had built one before.

To gain inspiration, Brunelleschi travelled to the Pantheon in Rome to see how the ancients had tackled dome building.

Brunelleschi’s plan was to build the white ‘ribs’ of the dome first, and infill with overlapping bricks, starting at the bottom, the erection supporting itself as it went.

Brunelleschi designed appropriate tools as they were needed.

He then built an inner dome, which would provide stability. Lastly, the white ribs were fixed in place with a lantern.

The dome became the inspiration for Michelangelo’s St Peter’s in Rome, and also the Capitol in Washington DC.

I left Mark, suffering from a heavy cold, at home today, and climbed up to the top of the dome on my own. Was it worth it? The views were good, but I think they are better from the Boboli Gardens. However, if you like towers, do it. You also get good and close to the ‘Last Judgment’ by Georgio Vasari.

The sunshine yesterday made a gentle amble round the centre following Rick Steves’ Renaissance walk very pleasant.

We started at the dome of the Cathedral, or Duomo.

However, more on that tomorrow as we have a timed slot to climb up inside the dome, and then 72 hours to visit the campanile, baptistry, crypt and Museum (All for €18 each seems not bad value).

Next stop was Orsanmichele church, initially built as a granary and grain shop, but converted to a church in the fourteenth century.

Outside the church, copies of fourteenth century statues (the originals are mainly scattered throughout the city museums) stand in niches.

Next stop Palazzo Vecchio and the square in front of it, Piazza Signoria.

Finally, although this wasn’t the end of the walk, a plaque in the ground.

The plaque marks the spot where a puritanical monk, named Savonarola, was hanged and burnt in 1498. After the excesses of the Medicis, he preached a return to a plainer way of life and encouraged the destruction of paintings and books produced during the Renaissance.

The Florentines, supported by the Pope and the exiled Medicis, fought back and arrested Savonarola, before dispatching him in a grisly manner.

It’s wonderful having time to watch …

While having lunch, in a corner of the Palazzo Vecchio, we watched a dozen men we took to be film crew (the blue rectangle in front of the Palazzo is a film screen) dragging, and arranging, a set of crush barriers to keep a crowd at bay. As soon as one arrangement was finished, some barriers would be undone, and carted off in another direction.

When we had finished lunch, and were standing in the Piazza looking at the statues, a gang of men in high-vis yellow arrived. They drove their van onto the Piazza, manhandled some of the arranged crush barriers into the van, drove the van to the other side of the square, unloaded the barriers and put them down into another configuration.

We have no idea what all this was in aid of, other than practice for some event. We thought we might just have to wait a bit too long to find out.

When the Medici family bought the Pitti Palace in the sixteenth century, they also purchased a parcel of land (from a family called ‘Bogoli’) in order to create a garden.

All thoughts of manicured lawns and magnificent flower beds must be driven from your mind if you are not to be disappointed. This is a formal Italian Garden made up of geometric shapes filled with grass, marble statues, ponds and fountains.

It is a lovely place to walk, though, and sit, although benches are pretty few, and admire the views.

Apparently, the open aspect of the garden and the expansive view of the city was unconventional at the time.

This evening we ventured out for a passeggiata, or evening stroll, and ended up in having a drink in the piazza in front of Santa Croce.

We haven’t been in Santa Croce yet, but it is where Michelangelo and Galileo are buried. There is also a monument to Florence Nightingale in the cloister, as Florence is the city in which she was born.

To be precise, perhaps I ought to say ‘Offices’ rather than just ‘Office’ as that is what ‘Uffizi’ means. The building was begun in 1560 to accommodate the offices of the Florentine magistrates. And I used to think that Thames House South, on Millbank, in London, where my father worked for many years, was grand!

Having been warned about huge crowds, we decided to start early yesterday morning, well 8.30, but it seems that everyone else had the same idea, and there were already long queues to buy tickets. Fortunately, with our PassePartout cards, we could ‘jump the line’ and were soon inside.

We are planning to do a little of the Uffizi at a time and so just followed half of Rick Steves’ tour. Here are just a few favourites.

So much art had made us hungry so we headed off for the indoor food market, Mercato Centrale. The building dates from the late nineteenth century at a time when Florence was the capital of Italy and was designed by Giuseppe Mengoni, best known for his cast-iron and glass-vaulted Galleria Vittorio Emanuel II in Milan.

The building was renovated a few years ago and is now a place where local people can do all their food shopping and grab a bite to eat. The ground floor has food stalls and outlets selling local dishes and snacks. Upstairs is more set up for more restaurant-type food. Feeling adventurous, we tried a typical Florentine dish downstairs.

The food was all right, we both finished the contents of our bowls, but we decided it wasn’t something we’d rush out and have again.

On our free guided walk round Florence this morning (we are such cheapskates) we learned more about this dish. It is made, apparently, from the fourth and final stomach of a cow (sorry, vegetarians). I don’t think it’s one for the recipe folder.

Given the chance to visit places that were opening free for the day yesterday there was no stopping us.

Palazzo Davanzati, dating from the fourteenth century, has been named after the Davanzati family, who lived there for 260 years until the death of the last heir in 1838. The Palace managed to escape the large scale demolition of medieval Florence that was carried out in the nineteenth century, but went on to have a rather chequered history with various owners carrying out dubious restoration work, financed through the sale of Palace contents.

Eventually, the Palace was bought by the Italian state in 1951 and kept open as a museum, closing briefly in 1995 to carry out major restoration work, to prevent the collapse of the building.

Today the Palace is presented as from the sixteenth century.

We didn’t see the top (third floor) which is where the kitchen would have been, common in grand houses so that the heat and cooking smells from the kitchen fires did not pass into the other rooms. There was also less risk to the rest of the building from out-of-control kitchen fires.

Our next free stop was Cappelle Medicee, burial place of the Medici family.

The New Sacristy was built by Michelangelo in 1519 over the space of ten years.

The last of our free museums, Museo Bargello, was built to house the chief of police in the thirteenth century, later used as a jail, and opened as a museum to house gothic and Renaissance sculptures in 1865. We followed Rick Steves’ audio guide and saw a selection of what was on offer.

Rick’s descriptions included details of why the pieces were made, how they were received and new techniques and ways of representation used by the sculptors. I won’t reproduce what we learned, just show you some pictures. If you’re interested, all Rick Steves’ tours and talks can be downloaded free.

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.

What do you think, was Naples more expensive or cheaper than Sicily? If you read the blog ‘Money Matters’ you will see that our aim is to keep our spend to about £3000 a month (4 weeks) and we went just over this in Sicily, spending a total of £3140.81. However this wasn’t bad considering a) we were moving around and b) we hired a car for eleven days.

Naples was very inexpensive and our total spend came in at £2228 for the four weeks. How so cheap? First, our accommodation was very inexpensive, second, we bought ‘Campagna Artecards’ which cover us for many museums in Campagna for a whole year. A lot of the places we visited allowed free entry with the card on two separate occasions. In this way we were able to visit Pompeii, the Archeological Museum in Naples and Caserta Palace twice. Most of the other places we visited gave us reduced entry with the card. This splendid card only cost us €43 each.

This is the breakdown for Naples:

Accommodation: £854.03 Entrances (including the cost of two Campagna Arte 365 cards) £197.27 Groceries: £294.50 Meals out (includes coffee, drinks and ice-cream) £375.55 Travel (including taxi and boat to Capri) £292.90 Anne haircut: £45 Mark haircut: £9 UK expenses: £160

How did we do in Capri? I don’t think we did too badly bearing in mind that Capri is a expensive destination with lots of high class shops etc. Our total spend for nine nights came in at £1076.

We were lucky enough to get our accommodation with a 20% discount as we are the first people in. We found groceries very expensive but meals out (we only had two) still cheaper than UK prices. A cappuccino cost between 4 and 6 euros a throw.

This is the breakdown:

Accommodation: £484 Entrances: £61.82 Groceries: £117.15 Meals out (includes coffee, drinks and ice-cream) £190.45 Travel (includes boat, taxi and train to Florence) £148.91 Other: £24 UK expenses £50

I am hoping that in giving you all the figures others might be inspired to get travelling too. It doesn’t have to cost a whole load of dough.

Next, we’re off to Florence for three weeks which we are expecting to be expensive. We will see how we do.

The other day we tried to visit Villa Lysis, neo-classical/Art Nouveau home of a colourful character called Fersen. Unfortunately we found it closed, but with three conflicting notices of opening times. According to the webpage it should have opened yesterday, but it was still very much closed today (the website have now changed the information to say it opens in April). Mark keeps saying, ‘Remember where you are.’

From there, we walked on to the Arco Naturale, a natural arch of limestone standing eighteen metres high next to the cliff face. The views were stunning.

We then took the long coastal path, with many up and down sections, back to Capri Town.

Eventually, we had sight of a very modern-looking house in an isolated position. This was designed by the owner, Curzio Malaparte, in the 1930’s (apparently it is an excellent example of Italian modern and contemporary architecture). A fascist, Malaparte fell out of favour with the Fascist party, and spent time at Villa Malparte under house arrest.

The house can be reached via a very treacherous looking private path from the path we were walking along, or by boat ‘on calm days only.’ I love the look of the house, but I wouldn’t like to be that isolated.

Further on, we had another view of the Faraglioni rocks.

We climbed Monte Solaro, the highest point on the island, today.

At the top we met an Australian couple who are also travelling for a year, but through Europe rather than just Italy. They are also doing Airbnb, but are moving from place to place as the whim takes them, staying for just a few days at a time, whereas we are staying at each place for about a month (to gain advantage from long-term discounts) and have booked ahead as far as August 5.

The other big difference is that they have all their luggage in two large rucksacks while we have two suitcases, a roll-on cabin bag and two medium-sized rucksacks. I don’t know how they can manage with so little, but I am envious of the ease at which they are able to move around.

I have a list of items I consider as essential when staying for long periods abroad.

• Swiss Army knife (with corkscrew, bottle opener and screw driver)
• folder of suitable recipes (mainly Italian as I know I can get the ingredients)
• salt and pepper grinders (the sort that you buy cheaply and are non-refillable)
• a set of measuring spoons (Airbnb kitchens never seem to have measuring jugs or scales)
• a good all-purpose knife in its own case
• apron (for when one of us is cooking)
• elastic clothes washing line
• travel kettle (boils enough water for a mug of tea – saves having to heat water in saucepans)
• cotton-lined rubber gloves (I am allergic to normal rubber gloves)
• hot-water bottle for winter travel (every place we have stayed in has been freezing for the first couple of days as they have stood empty over the winter)
• plug in mosquito repellent (the sort you buy tablets for)
• game for when we have no internet etc. We usually take Scrabble away with us, but even our Travel Scrabble takes up quite a lot of room, so for this trip we have Bananagrams.
• Chromecast (enables us to watch British TV via the internet on a TV set, provided you are also using vpn)

I wonder what you have on your list of essentials? It would be great if you could leave a comment and let me know.

Anyway, back to Monte Solaro. It was a fairly steep climb up, and I fancied taking the chair lift down, just because chairlifts are fun. We had seen the chairlift stopping and starting most of the way while we were walking up, and we had assumed it was to give them time to load and unload the big containers of water which were being carried on some of the seats.

However, when we got to the top, we discovered that the chair lift is not open until next week and for now they are carrying out tests with the water containers standing in as people.

Oh well. Shanks pony down.

It was just as well as we saw some more goats. The nanny goat was white, and the two kids were black and white, the front half of their bodies were black, and the back half were white. They looked as if someone had held them by their back legs and dipped them in chocolate to halfway up their bodies. Sadly, I didn’t manage to get a good photograph of them.

The shops and restaurants that were closed when we arrived on Capri are now opening up for the end of March. Over the last few days we have noticed that the activity is getting more frenetic. Having let the places get dusty, dirty etc over the winter it seems as if people have just realised the tourist season is just round the corner and are now busy with the paintbrush and broom.

Lizards and butterflies are also coming out of their hidey-holes. The lizards here are green or green and brown, but on the farthest of the Faraglioni rocks, the same lizards are blue, to match the azure blue if the sea.