Firenze

We arrived in Florence in the afternoon and took a taxi from the train station to our Airbnb apartment.  Our hostess who arrived on a motor scooter about ten minutes after we did was named Monica.  She took me up to the fourth floor of the building where there was a small but clean and modern apartment looking out on the building across the narrow cobblestone street.  Pam had walked up to a little store and returned with the fixings for mozzarella salad.  We called out the window for her to come up.

 

      Florence was the one city I wanted to see having read the story of the building of the cathedral  Brunelleschi’s Dome  by Ross King.  The streets are narrow,  paved with basalt stones and open into spectacular piazzas, each one with architecture and art you couldn’t dream existed.  Cars are banned or limited throughout most of the city.  There are small family owned grocery stores and little restaurants in every conceivable corner of the city.   There are fantastic, enormous, intricately carved doors everywhere as if each local renaissance merchant had to outdo the other with the size of his entry door and its knockers.