Firenze: David - Duomo Tour - Dome Climb

13 September

• Accademia Galleria
• Santa Maria del Fiore
• Dome climb 

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Accademia Galleria

Today (Wednesday) was my first day with my bags, and therefore my first day I was mentally in Florence. This morning I set out to make a reservation for the Accademia Galleria  using my Firenze card to guarantee a spot.  The earliest time was 1:45 so I'm still not sure how the card guaranteed me a spot regardless of space, but I didn't want to argue. 

I went to get some food and joined my tour of the Cathedral. 

Santa Maria del Fiore

I'd like to say I learned a lot but I didn't. I'm not sure what the relationship is with the Opera del Duomo (OPA). I later learned that at least the pass options available to go to multiple sites run by a different company, so it's possible their tour guides (while licensed) are also contracted out.  Most of this is no fault of the tour guide, but the lady who lead the tour project her voice well (which to a degree had to do with the location of the tour), had a bit of a speech impediment along with her accent, all combining to--for me--a challenge to hear more than a smattering of what she was saying. If you she wasn't near me and/or facing my direction it was likely I was not understanding her. 

The church itself is cavernous. Its renaissance styling makes it very different from most of the cathedrals I've grown a custom to in Northern Europe. St. Paul's in London is the only other renaissance styled cathedral I can recall going into.  There is a really neat tiled floor that has a 3D affect where it looks like a funnel to the middle of the floor. 

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 One of my favorite parts of the church is probably the Dante Alighieri fresco on the North wall. It's an image of him holding his Divine Commedia in front of a setting including Hell, Paradise, and Heaven (the latter imagined in the form of a Florence he could not have been eye witness to as he was exiled at the time). 

Obviously, the huge and immaculate dome vault is the highlight for most. It really is incredible. Five concentric mosaic circles depicting the last judgement.

Dome Climb

Brunileschi's dome is 463 steps to the top viewing area. The higher one gets the steeper the incline, and the less one will want to have been born tall. :-) It's kind of hard to display the angle in an image, so I will only upon request. I chose the time I went up strategically though...well me and others it would seem. The access to the dome climb is by time slot, and I suspect folks who went up in earlier groups stayed there for what I was hoping to see: a sunset from the top. We all got that sunset. (Perhaps to the chagrin of the folks that work there and make sure tourists don't do stupid things and go in the correct direction who made it VERY clear that we needed to hurry up on the way up and when they wanted to go down they told us it was time to get.)

It was worth it for me to suffer the slings and arrows of the impatient-to-get-home.

 

I was hoping to get through all three days in this one blog, but it's getting too late for me to do this the way I do it and not the far better and more succinct way Libby is able to (❤️ you, babe), so you'll need to wait in suspense to see what 14 and 15 (and 16) September had in store for Tommy. 

Did he spend far too much time at the Uffizi and still had to speed run like 1/4 of it? Did he have Pizza? Did he find a Mexican restaurant? Ill let you place bets amongst yourselves and find out next time.