Walking tour

Wednesday 16th April 2025

It’s do busy here that all the tours were fully booked do we did a self guided tour with TouringBee. It was over 4km around Florence with over 20 stops. I won’t bore you with all the photos but will mention some. The middle picture is the Duomo, we arrived there at 850 and there was a bit of a queue but we joined thinking it would open at 9. Quickly realised it opened at 1015!!! No way were we queuing that long! The round tower is now a hotel and is one of the oldest buildings left in Florence. Cool hotel!

Onto the market which has a very famous small boar. As you can see you touch his nose for luck! Apparently it is a copy of a copy! At the Palazzo Vecchio there were a collection of statues. A copy of David by the food and a selection in loggia next to it. As a comparison there was a modern sculpture of a girl on a phone in the middle of the square. Could do better I think, the competition is very good!

Obviously there would have been a Toman town here but it has all been built in. This is really interesting though, you can see the curve in the walls of the apartments, built on the remains of the Toman amphitheatre, apparently you can see some bits of it in their basements. I looked up google maps and you can see the whole structure quite clearly! Off the the church of sainta Croce next. And we decided to go inside this one, so pleased we did!!

Lots of the great and the good have tombs here including Galileo, Michelangelo and Rossini! They don’t seem to be too worried about the tombs on the floor, pretty worn out with walking!

Overall the tour was great and we learnt a lot. I bought a wine from a wine window and then drank it in the laundrette later as we did our final wash!! We went to a lovely looking restaurant in the evening. Actually the food was only ok but the place was lovely. Robin had fried tripe for starters, I tried some but it didn’t taste of much. Not for me really!