11/14/08: Day 20: Livorno (Florence)

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Originally uploaded by Rance Rizzutto Photography

A lot of photos have been added to Flickr...use the link to the right. I'm still working on adding photos to the blog posts. I ran out of time in the internet cafe.

Day 20…yikes. Days are burning by on this leg since we’re out everyday.

I did a leg workout late last night after the show because I knew things would be non-stop today. Ai yi yi. We walked a lot and climbed a lot of steps today. The Livorno train station is near to Pisa, a little further away from Lucca, and just under 2 hours away from Florence. We got off the ship at 7:45 to catch a train to Florence. It started with a train to Pisa at 8:26 to catch a Florence train that made a lot of little stops…but we finally got there.

There were a few things Deanna wanted me to see. The “Florence Duomo” (as she knows it…she says it has a more official name), and the statue of David. Those were the two big ones and we had about 4 hours before we needed to catch the train ride back.

The Duomo. A church. Churches seem to come in two flavors: super fancy on the outside; or super fancy on the inside…never/rarely both. This was a super fancy on the outside place, but still cool on the inside. The nice thing about this Duomo…for E3.50 you could climb to the top of the dome. That was a lot of stairs for my recently worked out legs, but worth the view. The climb took us not only right up by the art work inside the dome, but up and outside on top. The view was awesome.

It turns out that going down on wobbly legs is harder than going up. This time of year is perfect for coming to see Italy. The season is ending so there are way less people and it is much cooler out. While we were climbing the tiny, tight stairwells Deanna said “imagine this 30 degrees hotter and packed with people.” That would have been awful…especially since there is one part of the stair climb that is two way, but also has people coming back down from the dome. That would be yuck.

After that we went to see the statue of David. Carved from a single piece of marble. Amazing. And I’m not talking about his penis, perves. The little details are what got me…veins on arms, wrinkles on knuckles, toenails. Amazing.

From there we had time to eat and hop on the train. There was an empty seat in front of me (those kind where it is two seats facing two other ones) that had gum on it. So, I thought no one would sit there. Wrong. A lady sat her two sons there. I took a few pics of them so you can see the kids that were practically on my lap for two hours. The nice thing was we got on a train going directly from Florence to Livorno. The nicer thing was it made 5 stops total. If we would have waited a little longer in Livorno for the direct train we would have probably got there in the same amount of time if not faster.

We had our VIP party and I rocked my ascot. Now, I sleep.