Day 44: Florence for one more day. Palazzo Pitti.

Last day in Florence today.  It’s always amazing how after just a few days you feel at home in a place, comfortable walking around without getting lost.  Such a sharp contrast to when you first step out of the train station or airport into a new city and you can’t even work out which way is north.

Markets were setting up in the streets, and the Ponte Vecchio was crowded even at this early hour.

The Palazzo Pitti, however seemed thankfully quiet, and no queues at all at the ticket office.  Tickets in hand; you need two tickets for this one, one for the palace, and another for the garden.  The garden ticket also gets you into the costume gallery, back inside the palace.  Yeah, I don’t get it either apart from it cost 23 euro all up.

Anyway, this is one pretty amazing gallery, and takes quite a while to get through.  We spent about 3 hours and covered all the art gallery, but I was suffering pretty severe gallery fatigue for the last 5 or so rooms.  I re-entered one of the rooms, and even though I’d only been in it 5 minutes beforehand, I couldn’t remember a single painting on the wall.  My head was full of Tuscan and Florentine art and I couldn’t fit any more in, it was coming back out of my ears. Still, it was all amazing and on a longer stay in Florence a couple days between galleries would solve this problem.

So I got my fix full of Botticelli, Lippi, Raphael, Van Dyke, and even some Rubens.  No pics allowed, I found out after taking a picture of the ceiling.  Which didn't turn out....

There were these two guys looking at the Lippi: Madonna with the Child and Scenes from the Life of St. Anne.  Another famous and very beautiful Lippi.  Apart from Birth of Venus, I think I like the Lippi paintings more than the Botticelli’s.

Now these two American guys were talking, well mostly one was.  And it was this continuous flow of unfiltered thoughts whilst he looked and analysed the typology and meaning of the painting.  All very pretentious and very distracting until an Italian woman came up and told him to be quiet.  Priceless.

The costume gallery was quite interesting, though not what I expected.  I thought it would be a lot of period Italian costumes, but instead it was a montage of Italian fashion through mostly more recent modern times.  The two highlights being the actual clothes on display that had been removed from the tombs of the Medici’s during one of a few of their exhumations, and a huge collection of hats where the use of feathers in hats reached its ultimate evolution with a complete dead bird perched atop one hat, trumped in the next case by another hat featuring two dead birds.

The café at the gallery was reasonably priced so we recovered a little with pizza and beer before hitting the garden.

This garden was huge, but I didn’t think it particularly spectacular.  I wandered a little, checked out a few fountains and then we returned via the gelato shop to pack and get our train on to Rome.

Now I finally got to see some of that beautiful Tuscan country side; the rolling hills with villages perched on top reminded me of the south of France oh so long ago.

More tunnels and mountains, then flying past the cars on the freeway (you know, cars that were doing 130km/hr) and within an hour we were at Roma Termini.

At our apartment we outlined our itinerary for Rome over the next few days to cover the usual must sees: including the Colosseum and Forum, Vatican City including booking tickets, and a day trip to Pompei.  This was going to be great.

It was dark and quite late now, so we walked down to the end of our street and to the Colosseum.  I noticed that all of the cars along the streets to the Colosseum where cordoned off with police tape.  Interesting.  I’d have thought they couldn’t all be illegally parked.  Surely people here would know where they were allowed to park?

We arrived at the Colosseum, and yes, this thing is big.  Would you believe it, it was half covered in scaffolding!  Everywhere we have been a lot of what we have wanted to see has been covered in scaffolding.  Is this normal, or are we just having bad luck?  We didn’t even notice Constantine’s Arch as it also was half covered in scaffolding.  Still, what we could see of the Colosseum looked really amazing at night time.

As we walked back home, all of the cars we had seen cordoned off were now being towed away!  A dozen tow trucks were making quick work of clearing the streets.  Wow, remind me to be super careful where I park in Rome!

Here's the picture album link, for what it's worth.  Didn't really take many more pics than already in the blog.  Damn art galleries and their no photo policies.