A taste of Italy: Florence 1

Sorry for the long lag since my last posting, but I've been too busy booking future trips to write up past ones! In the diary for 2009:-

• A long weekend in Madrid after scoring £5 flights on Ryanair;
• A long weekend in London after booking rooms in the latest Travelodge sale (it worked out at £12pppn, even including the Saturday night);
• And two weeks in the sun in Greece (aboard easyJet's new Manchester-Athens route).

Before getting too carried away with itineraries and wishlists, there's time to revisit a bit of bella Italia and our long weekend in Florence back in February.

Florence is the last of the Italian 'big three' we have visited (our first trip to Italy was to Venice and the most time we've spent in the country was a week in Rome). For such a popular destination, few people fly direct to Florence and we were no different, flying with Ryanair from Liverpool to Pisa.

This was our first time to Liverpool 'John Lennon' Airport, which is a tin shed and some shops with a small runway attached. In order to reach the gate, travellers negotiate a convoluted series of stairs and escalators that serve no purpose except to take you past the shops and some terribly dusty community service artworks. The airport's one saving grace is that compared to Manchester it serves as a hub for Ryanair and is only a 45-minute bus ride from Manchester aboard the frequent shuttle service that leaves from a bus station practically next door to our flat.

Coincidentally, the same bus company operates the shuttle service from Pisa's airport to Florence, which took about an hour. A fat and orange full moon hung low in the sky as we crossed the River Arno. The dark streets were nearly empty except for American art history students on the piss, but we were unmolested on our way to our hotel which was about1 minute from the cathedral.

That close!

By this time it was getting late, so no late night pub crawls for us! The next morning we made straight for the cathedral, but it was so early it wasn't even open yet. It was still cloudy and cold, so my initial photos were not too promising.

The huge cathedral is so hemmed in by nearby buildings it's impossible to see much of it. Once the doors opened at 10 we all piled into...a large, empty cupboard. The interior of the cathedral is nigh on featureless: a swathe of inlaid floors, no pews, with blank walls supporting blank ceilings. Aside from a couple paintings there was nothing to see. I knew a lot of the artwork had been removed when the cathedral was being rebuilt, but this was like walking into a Woolworths on the last day of trading after the lights were switched off.


The one bit of decoration is the inside of the dome, but it is too high up to appreciate the frescoes and we weren't quite ready to climb up for a closer look either.

The exterior of the cathedral is a combination of white, green and red stone. The fairly recent marble cladding dates from the days when Italy became a newly united republic and Florence was named its first capital. The city leaders in a modernising fervour ripped down the medieval walls that hemmed in the city and made plans to tear down the Renaissance palaces to make room for broad boulevards. Luckily, the capital was switched to Rome, but not before leaving Florence's cathedral with a patriotic colour scheme.

Thanks to this, much of the centre of Florence retains its old world feel with narrow lanes overshadowed by palazzos, church towers and fortifications. More to explore soon!