A Whistlestop Tour of Florence

Good news, in Florence we have (finally) achieved the goal of visiting a city which the kids ‘quite liked’. Possibly due to the beauty, breath taking architecture, wonders of art and pocket sized charm of the city. However, in all truth, it was more due to a new formula we have developed where we ply the kids with Gelato and build a walking tour around the city based on looking for Geocaches. We had just long enough to ponder the talents of Michaelangelo in the (Carrara Marble – as seen in previous adventures) form of David, glance at the multicoloured hues of the enormous Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore (the third largest church in the world, after St Peter’s in Rome and St Paul’s in London), saunter over the Ponte Vecchio (the only bridge in the city not destroyed by the retreating Nazis in 1944), admire sculptures at the Pallazzo Vecchio and a few other things before racing off, map in hand to search for the next prize.

For the uninitiated, Geocaching is a global game where people hide anything, anywhere and make a note of its location online. Then other people go and find it. For fun. Luckily for us, Rafe and Odessa love the thrill of the discovery of a geocache, and we even met some other geocachers who were also struggling to find one near to the train station.

Another good reason to geocache across the city is that it helps to find some out of the way corners; hence we found ourselves an excellent spot for some lunch on the southern bank of the Arno while we were out and about. Zoe’s is a restaurant by day, and leans more towards being a bar by night. With opening hours from 8am until 3am, surely something for everyone? Lunch was good quality, large and a decent price too – a combination all too rare in Florence. (Tips: the seared tuna was excellent, the Tuscan ravioli very good with ragu and stuffed with truffled potato – somewhat filling. In addition, the salads were huge). They also had a TV set up playing muted re-runs of old Bundeliga matches which Rafe enjoyed.

We arrived in Florence on the train from Pistoia, where Amanda and Cesare kindly dropped us at the station in their convertible BMW, a big hit with the kids. Pistoia has a microclimate which makes it perfect for growing many kinds of plants, and the main source of income for the area appears to be growing those little box trees fashioned into balls and spirals to be sold in garden centres far and wide. From Pistoia, it was only a 40 minute trip on a comfortable train, using our trusty inter-rail tickets into the station at Firenze Santa Maria Novella, a delight of Italian Rationalist architecture right in the heart of the city. Disappointingly, the outside of the station was largely covered with scaffolding for repairs, but this did not affect our viewing of the elegant interior and frescos of daily life in Florence in the 1930s.