Florence

Buona sera!

Easy for you to jump from Belgrade to Florence in a second through this blog.
For me, it took more than 15 hours in a bus, with 3 border crossings (Serbia > Croatia > Slovenia > Italy), and you never know how long you will remain blocked at the border here. Between Croatia and Slovenia, it took us more than one hour, which can compete with the border between Namibia and Botswana one month ago.

But at last here I am in Florence, a centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of that era. It is considered the birthplace of the Renaissance, and has been called "the Athens of the Middle Ages".
I've already visited the city twice before, 22 and 11 years ago (yes, there seems to be a pattern, we can probably guess when will be my next visit, because for sure there WILL be a next visit...),
but each time I come to Italy, I have to come back here, again and again, because I absolutely love this place.
It is part of the very few cities in the world where every street and every building is worth seeing.
There is no better way to discover it than to get lost, and wander aimlessly, looking for hidden treasures and sitting down for another cappucino in front of a small (or great) wonder.
Even the names of the bus stops between the train station and the hostel make me dream:
Savonarola, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Donatello, Fra Bartolommeo, Botticelli, Piazza San Marco...

First of all, let me introduce you to my favorite monument in the world, the Florence cathedral, "il Duomo".

This is the Basilica San Lorenzo (yes, again, you are going to face lots of pictures of religious buildings during the next articles, don't forget I am in Italy...):

After Stratford-upon-Avon in July, where I visited the birthplace of Shakespeare, Alcala de Henares about 2 years ago, where Cervantes was born, and Frankfurt where I went I don't know how many times, and where Goethe was born,
here is the birthplace of Dante (I am not mentioning Molière in this list, because he was born in Paris, which makes things a lot easier for me, even though nobody is quite sure where exactly he was born).

And this my new car, for the next week.

(no, I was just kidding!)

I don't know what you think of the thing which appeared in front of the Palazzio Vecchio since my last visit but, personnally... let's think about a polite way to say it... Let's say that I won't miss it if it is no longer here in 11 years.

Here is the Ponte Vecchio. It has always hosted shops and merchants who displayed their goods on tables before their premises.
It is said that the economic concept of bankruptcy originated here: when a money-changer could not pay his debts, the table on which he sold his wares (the "banco") was physically broken ("rotto") by soldiers, and this practice was called "bancorotto" (broken table; possibly it can come from "banca rotta" which means "broken bank"). Not having a table anymore, the merchant was not able to sell anything.
During World War II, the Ponte Vecchio was not destroyed by Germans during their retreat on the advance of the liberating British 8th Army on August 4, 1944, unlike all other bridges in Florence.

My first tiramisu (probably not the last one because the end of the holidays):

Talking about wandering aimlessly in the streets, I usually don't check the map in Florence, and have therefore no idea what is worth seeing. As a result, in my 2 previous trips, I hadn't spotted this amazing Church, the Santa Croce.

Each time, I visit a different museum, and this year it is the Galerie degli Uffizi, which hosts an incredible collection of paintings by Da Vinci, Raffaello, Caravaggio, Michelangelo and other Italian painters. But the most breath-taking part is the building itself, with the ceiling of the main galery covered with such paintings, meter after meter.

 

By the way, my camera decided to go on a long term strike during the visit of the cathedral, and I haven't managed to convince it to work since then. To be honest, the poor thing has taken more pictures during the last months then a normal camera would take in its whole life, with temperatures scaling from -20°C to more than 40°C, under the snow, in the middle of the sand... So I can understand why it is exhausted and won't take a single more picture. Let's see if I can find how to fix the problem when I am back in Paris but, in the meantime, you will see pictures taken with the phone.