Day 14 - Mar 18, 2013 Last updated: 4/7/13 12:00pm PT
Today we went into the Duomo and the Duomo Museum. Construction of the Duomo was begun in 1296, with the completion in 1436. The façade is “new”, being completed in 1887.
We also went to the Duomo Museum. This museum contains many of the original pieces of the Duomo, which have been replaced with replicas so the originals can be protected.
These are the original baptistery doors.
This is Michelangelo’s Pietà, possibly his last sculpture.
We then went to the Precious Stone museum. It is very small, but had some cool inlaid stone pieces of art. These are made by assembling small pieces of different color stones cut to precise sizes and put together like a puzzle to create an amazing piece of art (or in some cases, tables).
This picture shows that an oil painting was first created to use as a guide when making the stone table.
We had lunch at All’Antico Vinaio. We walked past this place twice and saw these huge lines waiting to get in. We looked them up online and discovered they were Ranked #1 of 1,438 restaurants in Florence on TripAdvisor. They make sandwiches, which doesn’t sound like it should be the top rated place, but it was very good. To beat the crowds, we got there 15 minutes before they opened for lunch and we were behind only 3 people. The picture below shows the crowds. The sandwiches are so fresh the line pauses waiting for more focaccia bread to come out of the oven. We both had porchetta sandwiches. This was Denise’s favorite meal on the trip, we went here twice.
In the afternoon we walked outside the old city center of Florence. Not far, because it was rainy. We did not hit some of the big ticket art museums in Florence, we were getting museum fatigue and art isn’t among our primary interests.
Gelato is among our primary interests.
