The Final Day of our Walking Marathon in Old Florence

We awoke from our fantastic slumber and readied our worn and aching bodies for the toil of another days walking. We went down to breakfast to find a party of Indian tourists shouting in English at the waitress, who with the best will in the world had no idea what they were saying, I found it almost embarrassing listening to there stupid rants, pig ignorant and arrogant upper class Indians, typical of the most racist country in the world. There was no manners at all just demands and I wanted to tell the old fart who was the worst of the bunch to shut his stupid little face or I would fill it in for him. I hate rudeness and ill mannered people I just want to slap them about. I work as a supervisor and never talk to guys working for me in those terms. The poor waitress was so upset she even came to me and Jenny and was complaining in a nice way to us about their attitude even though it was all in Italian and Jenny was starting to pick up the language as it is a close relative of Spanish. I stuffed my face with as much of the fruit and croissants and yoghurt as I could stomach and then I had a few coffee’s to the point I was feeling sick, I have a bad habit of eating until I am full to bursting when the food is free, as I think of it. What a silly attitude to have, I know from my that eating lots is bad for you and will reduce my life expectancy but I cannot help it, I have even been ejected from pubs in England for picking up the food on a table meant for someone’s party when I haven’t been invited, I cannot help myself I am like a drug addict but with me it is food and the nicer the food the worst I am. When I am in a hotel, especially in the USA I will eat all the nice things and usually expensive things and then wash them down with a wine or a few beers and I have felt sick for hours and had indigestion for days after doing it, I know it isn’t healthy but I just love food. Anyhow, we got a bus into town and went straight to the Pitti palace


The posh residence of the Medici family and there was no queue to get the ticket. It was the 14.5 euros that I had heard the day before and we went into a reasonably quiet entrance to the house. We had been very lucky as there was an exhibition of Maria Medici, who was a very famous member of the family and she looked very pretty, from the portraits of her in the basement exhibition halls. She ended up marrying the king of France and mother of the wife of Charles the first of England. So very historically famous, there was lots of art work on loan from galleries around the world including the Louver. It was a great exhibition lots of fantastic paintings and art work and sculpture, but the rooms had nice ceilings but nothing to shout home about, we went to the main entrance to the state rooms and was knocked off our feet by the unbelievable ornate painted plasterwork of the ceilings and all painted with quite exquisite mythological scenes, and the plasterwork art was incredible with cherubs and other figure of human size sat on the picture rail and just mouth opening in its scale, the walls were hung with paintings by some of the most famous renaissance painters of the their day. Rubens was the most famous of all and there was not many but hundreds hung in rows along every wall. Staggering and this went on for room after room, galleries full of sculptures of larger than life proportions of Greek gods and wresters seemed to be quite popular and always naked, naked male wrestlers and for my sake all seemed to have disproportionately small gonads, I laughed a knowing laugh at that one. We spent maybe 3 hours touring the staterooms and to the final tour of the silver museum. There was lots of exquisite gold things usually religious artefacts crosses and alter goblets some very old, up to 700 years old. There was lots of things made out of hard stone and mosaic table tops and rock crystal and all covered in gold and silver. They also seemed very fond of Roman silver and gold objects of which there was plenty and Roman glass objects. We were walking on and on hour after hour round and round the many rooms and lingering on my feet is worse than walking the hard roads. Finally we went into the gardens for a relaxing sit down and to take in the fantastic sunshine of the Florence summer. It was a fantastic day and the smile we had on our faces after seeing all this wonderful art work was huge and was seen on all the photos we took, we had called this trip a honeymoon as we didn’t have the kids with us and to be honest it really felt like something very special for us both especially as it was unexpected and rushed after all the other things we had been doing. We took a long lazy stroll into town and had lunch after struggling to find somewhere that didn’t want to charge us 30 euros each to dine, I ended up with a wonderful Pizza and Jenny had some pasta. We got lost on the walk back to the bus station ending up almost back in the fort out of town but I found a quicker way back to the bus station. We had walked miles and miles again, but we had seen some fantastic things and we struggled back to the hotel and started packing but we were going to buy some snacks for supper but found every shop closed, we spent 45 minutes trying to find an open shop and found one selling some overcooked and expensive food which we had to have as we were desperate to eat. Once more we slumped into bed early as we were both travelling again next day and slept for a ridiculous amount of time again for an old fart like me.