First full day in Tuscany – off to Firenze (Florence, why do we call it that?) to walk around and visit the Uffizi gallery. We attempted to have lunch at a specific sandwich shop, but we didn’t have enough time before our scheduled museum visit. And thank goodness we had tickets ahead of time, that line was long!!! The museum was very big with lots of art, and walking around was so tiring. Those places are always so dry, they just suck the energy right out of you!

The older paintings from the 14th century with gold paint became quite tedious and boring. There were so many – same thing over and over. As time progressed through each gallery section the subjects, positions, styles and artistic abilities got so much better. I found the later art (late 15th century and 16th century) much more interesting, like Filippo Lippi and Botticelli. I especially liked this painting. Here are the pictures I took before they caught me taking pictures.

We were pretty tired after walking around the overwhelming museum, so we ended up at a wine bar. We were supposed to have one drink and carry on, but we just couldn’t muster up the strength. The wine guy, Zino, was super nice. He gave us a lot of recommendations for wineries to visit. He said paintings are not the only art in Florence, here you have art in a bottle! While we sat and enjoyed some delicious wine it started to rain for the first time on our vacation. It wasn’t raining too hard, so I actually didn’t mind that much.

I also saw a dog that looked JUST LIKE Joe (picture). I stopped his owner and tried to show him a picture of Joe, but he really didn’t care. And he didn’t speak any English.

Finally we left to have dinner. The food was pretty good and we had steak for the first time in Italy. It was huge! Orion and Steve shared it, Rebecca and I just had a few bites. Oh and by the way, bread in Tuscany doesn’t have any salt – its terrible! The bread in other parts of Italy was great though.