Firenze

Our third stop on our Italian winter vacation was Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance. Believe it or not, I classified it as optional when I was doing interrailing about two decades back, favouring Rome and Venice. Hey, I wasn't an art history major, nor a liberal arts student with options to do peculiar electives. I was an accounting and finance major, which helped me make choices when I have a budget to work with.

We were delayed by over an hour getting into Florence. We got to the Monterosso station ahead of time and my younger son noticed that SOPP was indicates against our train to Pisa Centrale. I said that may be to indicate that it is a Non-Stop train. Later we found out from another traveller that SOPP (abbr. for SOPPRESSO) meant that the train was cancelled. She advised us to take the next available train to La Spezia and catch the connection to Pisa Centrale, which we did but the train to Pisa departed 17 minutes late which meant that we missed the connection between Pisa and Firenze Santa Maria Novella. It's good that I watched one of Rick Steve's youtube videos about travelling by train when I was preparing for the vacation - the train schedule is good until it gets changed, so don't stress about it.

We arrived in Florence when it was already getting dark. After a short rest at the apartment, we set out to Trattoria Zaza for a wonderful Tuscan dinner. Although everyone was reluctant, I got them to do a detour to Santa Maria del Fiore after dinner. We were treated with the most stunning view of the cathedral.  The Christmas decorations were up and many tourist were out on the streets. It felt really festive. We had our gelato, our first since arriving in Italy, right next to the Duomo.

We returned the next morning to visit the Duomo but did not do the 463 steps up to the copula. Instead we had breakfast across the road followed by a walk to Piazza della Signoria and the historic Ponte Vecchio. I was initially planning to skip the museums because the kids would make a fuss. But after lunch, we decide to give the Uffizi a go, despite the expected resistance. To my surprise, the kids did take in some of the art.  We did quizzes on some of the paintings that depicted events from the Bible. Caravaggio's The Incredulity of Saint Thomas was an opportunity to discuss the prophetic words from the book of Isaiah, what happened during Jesus' crucifixion, and what it took for Thomas to finally believe that Jesus rose from the dead.

The next morning, I wanted to see if I would be twice lucky. I brought the family to Galleria Accademia since we didn't have any plans other than catching the afternoon train to Rome. I didn't know what to expect aside from Michaelangelo's David. The Christian art collection was exquisite and invited a number of questions from the kids - what is INRI? why is there a skull below the crucified Christ? why some of the people in the painting look so grey? The kids giggled at David. The Accademia is a lot smaller than the Uffizi so it is a good beginners art museum.

There is so much more to see and do in Florence and well worth another visit. There are also a couple of day trips that would have been worth doing if we had the time. But I am glad we didn't skip the Uffizi and the Accademia on the assumption that it would be too painful for the kids The problem with skipping such things is that you never know what you have missed, like when I skipped Florence many years back.