Time to leave Northern Italy and head South, to … Florence! Capital of Tuscany. Yay. I drove down from Claino to Milan, dropped off my car at the train station (bye little BMW, we’ve had a good time together this past couple of weeks), and boarded a fast train.
Have I ever told you I love trains? I do. I love them dearly, and I love train stations, bridges, rails, etc. right along with them. European trains are amazing.
I had brought some cheese, charcuterie, and wine along with me from Malcesine, and the wisdom of that was revealed on the trip. Wonderful lunch.
But a quick digression about the 11th biblical plague. Along with the cheese, charcuterie, and wine, I had also brought a little can of Illy coffee. Now if you don’t know Illy is a national treasure and one of the main reasons Italians are so happy. Well as I was riding the escalator / ramp thingie up to the platforms in the Milan station, my bags slipped, and everything went everywhere. In the process the Illy can was unleashed and there were coffee grounds in everything. The cheese and charcuterie and wine, certainly, but also my bags, my clothes, the escalator, everything (likely, that escalator will never run properly again and will have to be replaced).
The Illy plague stayed with me for days and we’ll come back to that in future posts. For now, lunch was great albeit slightly coffee-flavored 🙂
And so on to Florence!
After a quick stop at the AirBnB apartment – excellent BTW – I took off for the city centre and some traveling.
Definition: difference between a tourist and a traveler: a traveler does not know what is going to happen next. I did not.
I stop at a caffe to have a caffe, and watch …
This is where I discovered – ta da – Google Lens. Let’s say you are somewhere – how did I get here – and you are surrounded by visually interesting “stuff” like buildings and statues and monuments, but you don’t know what they are … how do you find out?
The good people of Google have invented something they call Google Lens which is a part of the Google App (not to be confused with Googling in a web browser). You point Google Lens at something – anything – and it does a reverse visual search to find it and explain what it is. And it works!
I was able to identify all the buildings and statues in the Palazzo, despite distance, and it was supercool. I did try it on a pigeon sitting on one of the statues named Roberto, no dice. He was not in the Google database.
Florence is so amazing there are beautiful things on every hand. But one of the most beautiful and impressive is the Duomo, the central cathedral. The workmanship on the facade is transcending and emotional.
The apartment was great and its best feature was a rooftop patio, so I scurried back to view the sunset.
The AirBnB owner recommended a restaurant nearby which was near the Duomo. It turned out to be not-perfect (all rice dishes, including rice cakes as an appetizer) but fortunately there was another restaurant right near by with a much better menu and kitchen … and so it goes …
After dinner snapped a few more amazing shots from the roof. My new iPhone 12 pro camera is being put to the test.
Onward … but I must say sitting up there looking at Florence by night I could only say, well, how did I get here 🙂
How did I get here 