Early bird eats the canoli

April 22nd--We headed out of the apartment early this morning hoping to miss a lot of the crowds for the museums. Since it's "Week of Culture", all of the State Museums have free admission so we thought we would try to see as much for free that we could. Anyway, first on our list today was the Uffizi Gallery. We knew going into this that our chances were probably not very good at getting right in since the museum is the most popular in Florence. We walked up and there was already an incredibly long line. Well, we knew that we could purchase tickets with a specific reserved entry time, so Mike went to the ticket booth to check on buying tickets. It turns out that all we had to pay for was the advance ticket fee (4 euros), but not the actual entry ticket. So, we walked away with a 1:15 p.m. entry time into the gallery. We are still not sure why so many people were standing in the long line. This worked out well because we had another museum close by that was on our list for today, the Pitti Palace. On our way to the palace, we stopped off at a bakery for a morning snack. This was our first taste of a canoli in Italy and it was goooooooood! We ate them sitting right outside the Pitti Palace. Once we finished up, we entered the Pitti Palace free of charge and with no wait at all (this was extremely good because when we left, there was a pretty long line). The Pitti Palace houses 3 separate museums and 2 gardens. The palace itself is pretty massive but with a plain outside. The main museum that covers most of the former residence of this Palace is the Palatine Gallery. This gallery houses the 2nd best collection of paintings in town and we toured all 56 rooms of them. The walls were sagging with 16th and 17th century masterpieces. The paintings were hung literally everywhere and some of the rooms which served as royal apartments previously were decorated with time period furnishings as well. It would probably have been a little tiring and overwhelming for the kids if it had not been for the room guides. Each room had a cardboard room guide that provided a layout of the pictures with a number and description of each. While Abby could not read the description, she could find the picture on the map with the corresponding number. So in EVERY room, she had to pick up the room guide and point out each painting and its number on the wall. After a while, Mike and I were dragging her and Austin out of the rooms! After finishing up the 56 rooms, we were a little tired of looking at paintings so we ventured out to the Boboli Gardens. This garden is located behind the palace. We walked up the hill to the top of the garden and got a wonderful view of the palace and parts of Florence. From here, we decided to get a quick sandwich before heading to the Uffizi Gallery for our 1:15 p.m. entry time. The line to get in to the Uffizi was still really long, but luckily we had a separate entrance since we had gotten the tickets this morning. We got right in the gallery at 1:15 p.m and used Rick Steves' guidebook to tour us through the gallery. The Uffizi Gallery (pronounced oo-FEED-zee) has the greatest overall collection anywhere of Italian paintings. The Uffizi is a U-shaped building. So, our question of the day is "Is the building U-shaped because it's called the Uffizi" or "Is the building called the Uffizi because it's U-shaped?" hmmmm.... (Actually, Uffizi means "office" and the building was originally the offices for the Florentine magistrates.) Anyway, we enjoyed seeing pictures transition from 2-D artwork to 3-D artwork over the Medieval to Early Renaissance periods. We also saw Early Renaissance works by Botticelli (including the Birth of Venus) and Leonardo da Vinci. After viewing some of the Medicis' collection of sculptures in the Sculpture Hall, we entered into the High Renaissance period artwork. Here we saw masterpieces by Michelangelo (his only completed easel painting), Raphael and Titian. As we've mentioned before, we are not art experts or historians and so probably miss a lot of the true importance of a museum like this (or the one from the morning). However it is enjoyable to take a basic guidebook like Rick Steves' and learn about the transition from 2-D to 3-D paintings and also to appreciate the periods and some basic concepts of each (i.e. works with balance and order = pure Renaissance). As we left the Uffizi on the way back to the apartment, we, of course, finished up the day with a gelato. We've decided that we are so lucky to have ended up in Florence during "culture week" because today alone we saved over 50 euros in admission fees. To celebrate, we went to our favorite Italian restaurant by our apartment, Trattoria "da Giorgio"!