What we did in Firenze
A year ago we were spending 8 days visiting 4 cities in Italy, out of which, exactly a year ago today I was celebrating my dad's birthday eating a burger at a restaurant in Florence. A little over a month ago we were there for the second time. We didn't go to that restaurant though, because the special from last year was no longer available.
We got to see many of the same sites we had previously seen but the first time we went we didn't know it was possible to go up the dome. This time our main focus was just that, we bought tickets that included access to all the monuments in the Complex of Santa Maria del Fiore: Brunelleschi's Dome, Giotto's Bell Tower, the Baptistry of San Giovanni, the Crypt of Santa Reparata inside Florence Cathedral, and the Opera Museum and we began our visit around the city...
Unfortunately the Opera museum was closed when we were there so we were unable to go inside, and the baptistry was completely covered in scaffolding, but we had fun visiting 3 out of the 5 included monuments, even if we only saw the Cathedral on our way up and down.
We opted out for going really early on Monday morning, We were within the first 15 in line to go into Brunelleschi's Dome (better known as Il Duomo di Firenze)! It was the first thing we did, as we were going up my sister and I got tired before Avi, but we didn't make it so obvious so she didn't think that being tired was an option and we took a quick rest and continued going up. We passed by the inside of the church, but you had to take the pictures quickly or you would hold up the line.
Once we were at the top we started taking all the pictures of us and all the monuments we could find:
Since we were at the front of the line it was really empty, we didn't have to wait for anybody to move for us to take a picture.. before going down, I noticed that it was packed and we did struggle to get a picture because of this.
Same thing on the stairs,
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| is this going up or down? |
we had to wait for people to go up and make room for us to go down. we were behind a pair of English folks, who were very nice and let Avi go down with them (she didn't want to be with me anymore) & they took this picture of us:
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| She's happy, but doesn't want to come out in our picture. |
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| two thirds up |
We were at the top for a while, since the sun was bright we took turns going outside and staying in the shade (there's a rest area and avi was playing with some other kids).
There was a security guard in his office at the top, I asked him how many steps there was, we had heard 400 at the dome and 200 or so at the bell tower, and he told me that the total was 875. We had gone up that many stairs without knowing, and we didn't have to carry Avi, yay!
You can view My "Google Story" here.
Have you ever been up there, what time did you go, was it packed?
Linking up with:
Amy: the Begining
Jessi:
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