DAY 14 – Florence to Rome

Again a travelling day, but today with a twist. We started out with a walking tour around Florence in the morning, with our tour guide Eloise. Middle aged, petite and dressed in a regal pant suit this lady would continue to calmly explain the sights of Florence even if there was a catastrophic disaster happening around her. We could have listened to her smooth Florentine accent all morning long as she enlightened us to the early days of Michelangelo, Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci. Famous statues we strolled by included David, one of Michelangelo’s most well known pieces.

Interesting fact: In Italy, especially around Florence it is actually cheaper to build with Marble than wood. Driving from Nice to Florence you could see where they were mining the marble, it looked a bit like snow on the hills.

The tour finished with a visit to a Leather factory where we learnt how to make a Florentine jewellery box (or a letter box) and how to tell the difference between genuine and fake leather which was useful when we went to the markets afterwards…not much genuine leather there!

As the saying goes all roads lead to Rome and this is where we found ourselves after another couple of hours driving. Our tour leader Emma took us for a 5 hour wander around the sights of Rome with a compulsory stop for more Pizza and Gelato along the way. Rome is quite different to Paris in that a lot of the impressive historical buildings look a little rough as the marble on them was removed (or should we say ‘recycled’) to build the Vatican city. Sights we saw along the way included the Spanish steps, which are famous for people coming to sit on them, the Pantheon – originally built as a temple for all the gods, then a Catholic church but now a tourist attraction due to its unusual design. The church has a big dome with a hole in the middle which was thought to be a vent to let bad spirits out, luckily they were prepared for rain that came in with the floor sloping at various angles to drains in the ground. We also stopped at various ruins of market places with our final stop being the Colosseum, which was shut by that time of night but was nevertheless very impressive all lit up.