Cat's Adventures in the Wild: 6/15 - Last day in Florence

Buongiorno mondo!

Deciding to wear the new clothes today and try to get every bit out of this last day in Florence!

Change of plans! Ufizzi is this afternoon at 2pm, so we can get in both Galileo & Bargello this morning if we have a quick lunch.

Another beautiful morning in Florence with the swifts!

and Duomo

(ok - that one's not the Duomo - it's the little dome. Duomo has the giant Gold orb at the top - we can also see it from our hotel, but that's not the picture I took this morning.)

I need to find out what time Gallileo & Bargello open so I can start out right. It's Sunday so this may be a problem. Ugh.

Yay! Gallileo opens at 9:30am! Even on Sunday! Oh Happy days! And Bargello also opens at 8:15am, and has a multi-museum ticket to all the Medici houses.... So... It's time to get our bags to the next hotel & be on our way.

Very excited about today!

I love the sounds of the birds in the morning. The Church bells ringing every hour and every half hour. General plant on the streets first thing in the morning on Sunday here. ("Ding Dang Dong goes the bells" - quote credited to "Under the Tuscan Sun" with Diane Lane)

Lots of biking out there - manual & electric.

I feel a bit like a fake in my new Italian clothes. I'm sure i don't wear them nearly so well or fashionable as others, but then most people walking around this area are also tourists, just probably European & more comfortable with all of this. Putting phone away now 😂

The Galileo Museum was full of so many surprises! I had expected to see his telescopes and maybe a few personal items, but this museum was filled to the gill with scientific discoveries and inventions from Italian Scientists for centuries!

Thermometers & Barometers

Map tools & techniques

An assortment of Globes and mechanical methods to track all the heavenly bodies.

Devices for masuring how bodies move along an arch or inclined plane.

There was also a room of interesting Biological work, which someone had very artistically & scientifically represented all forms of childbirth and the medical ways to extract a poorly positioned baby. Some cases were sadly beyond hope - but it was important to represent why. These were formed in Taracotta and carefully painited for accuracy. (not on the Standard Art Tour - this was just for Clover & I)

OH! Yes! And the Telescopes! Almost forgot!

Regularly insisting that they discovered the answer for the question of Longitude (which we all know was the Englishman, John Harrison - but yes, the Italians thought through the problem of needing sometheing that could keep constant time against a fixed longitude - but it required something other than a pendulum clock to do it RE: my blog post for Greenwich Day 2024)

Last Surprise was Edison's First Phonograph - so weird to stumble across this!

Lunch with clover was just LOVELY! We stopped at Osteria Leoni.

Clover got a Risotto & I got a Caesar Salad with Chicken, with a glass of wine. Both of us were well satisfied & ready to sally forth toward the Bargello Museum! (have we already sallied twice today? I think that's enough, isn't it?) Turns out we sallied too quickly, too. Clover left their bag behind and we had to run back quickly to recover it. (THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to the wait staff for hiding it behind the wine bottles as soon as they found it!) Clover's Passport was in there and that would have been an awful loss.

Bargello Museum - Medici

Donatello's David - the famous one

Donatello's David - the less famous one

NOT Donatello's David... Or Michelangelo's.... this is by Andrea del Verrocchio

Jason - by Pietro Francavilla

Ufizzi Palace Museum - This is where you want to go to see completed paintings of Michelangelo or Leonardo. Such a joy! But don't worry - they've got some that are incomplete also.