Five travel tips for Florence
The Uffizi Gallery contains some of the largest and most important art collections in the world. It is also the oldest museum in the world. Most guidebooks and online travel sites will urge you to make sure a visit to the Uffiizi is included as part of any Florence vacation, no matter how short. What most of them don’t tell you, or at least emphasize strongly enough, is that without a pre-booked ticket, you may not be able to visit the Uffizi at all!
My wife and I had a three day vacation in Florence in early April 2005. We had planned to visit the Uffizi Gallery and as soon as we checked into our hotel we called the gallery to buy tickets. After several attempts without our calls being answered, we asked the hotel reception to make the reservation for us. They explained that the reservation line was almost always difficult to reach and that our three day stay might not provide enough notice to make a reservation possible. Despite this, the hotel staff were more than happy to keep trying while we enjoyed the other wonders of Florence.
We decided to check the situation for ourselves the next day, but discovered queues that hardly seemed to move, stretching an enormous distance around the Uffizi area. Standing in line all day was certainly not the way we wanted to spend our time in Florence, so we decided to leave things to the reception staff while we enjoyed the other attractions we had come to see. The next night we were informed that after many unsuccessful attempts to contact the reservation line, success was finally achieved, but only to receive information that all tickets were sold for the following day. Consequently, we missed out on seeing many of Florence’s greatest art treasures and our best travel tip for anyone visiting Florence on a short-term vacation is to book Uffizi Gallery tickets online some time before your vacation.
Another of the wonders of Florence that you cannot miss is the Duomo. In fact, it is impossible to miss this magnificent building because it dominates the city and can be seen from almost anywhere. Savor the views while enjoying a coffee at one of the cafes in the surrounding square. Walk around it, stopping from time to time to appreciate it from all sides. See it from more distant and elevated positions around the city. This was once the largest cathedral in the world and even now, almost six hundred years after it was built, it is the fourth largest. Florence always insisted on everything being the biggest and the best, but what really makes the Duomo unique is its dome or “Dome”. When Fillipo Brunelleschi undertook this masterpiece of Renaissance architecture, no one believed that such a dome was possible. The secret had been lost for over a thousand years, but Brunelleschi traveled to Rome to unravel it by examining the dome of the ancient Pantheon.
My advice to the Duomo is to ascend this incredible feat of engineering. You can do this by entering a ladder that leads inside the dome, between its inner and outer layers. When you reach the top, you can step out onto an external gallery that offers great views of the city and the surrounding Tuscan countryside. However, this gallery was never finished, so its views are restricted to the north and west directions.
Perhaps the next most famous monument in Florence is the Palazzo Vecchio. Once again, it is a building worth enjoying from all aspects of the exterior before entering to explore its fascinating art-filled interior.
My advice to the Palazzo Vecchio is to take a few minutes to look at the pollution-stained COPY of the world’s most famous statue and realize that while Michelangelo’s original David is safe inside the Accademia, the copy is right there. where was the original
This advice is to get away from the busiest tourist attractions in the city center and cross the Arno River via the Ponte Vecchio. The crowds on this wonderful and historic bridge will probably be even tighter than in the central squares you just left, but a hundred meters on the other side, they will have thinned out and you can explore the delights of the Boboli Gardens and Palazzo Pitti before walk the winding paths to Piazzo Michelangelo, which sits on a beautiful hill overlooking Florence and the surrounding area.
Florence is so beautiful that every year there are some tourists who have to be treated in local hospitals for a condition known as “Stendhal Syndrome”. Symptoms range from feeling dizzy to complete exhaustion. Stendhal was a French tourist whose tour of Florence in the 19th century overloaded his senses so much that he collapsed with these symptoms.
My final travel tip for a short vacation to Florence is to not try to pack too much. Even if Florence’s wealth of art treasures, beauty and architectural achievements don’t make you run for medical help, they can easily overwhelm a tourist who doesn’t heed this advice.