New Year in Florence 2005

(Distance from home 303 km). First trip in entirely female company: a hard test to pass for someone used to wandering in the company of wild friends in search of fun, certainly not driven by a desire to travel. The result was very positive, also because many others followed this one and others will follow. Even though as a start it had been a real disaster: leaving at dawn on a freezing morning, when we arrived at Rome's Tiburtina station our train was 4 hours late! But we don't lose heart and so we head to Termini station where we change tickets (thus losing the seat reservation) but our train is still late and packed and we arrive in Florence more than 6 hours behind schedule. But we don't lose heart: Florence is under snow, something that hadn't happened in a very long time, and anyone lucky enough to see it can only be even more captivated by this splendid city.

Florence is a living masterpiece, where you find squares where time has stood still like Santa Croce or the famous Piazza della Signoria. The beauty of the city is felt most when walking without any destination through the streets of the centre and discovering new evocative corners, marvellous squares and extraordinary monuments. As soon as you see Piazza del Duomo you have the feeling that the cathedral rests there like a splendid piece of stagecraft: it's hard to believe that such a marvel is real. The streets were full of colourful cows that brought cheer to the grey of the bad weather. The Uffizi Gallery is an extraordinary thing even for someone who isn't an art lover like us: it holds treasures such as Botticelli's Venus, Bacchus just to name the ones that struck me most and that I remember given the vastness of the collections.

Absolutely not to be missed: the Uffizi, the Duomo, the climb up Giotto's bell tower, the church of San Lorenzo, the Ponte Vecchio and the Fiorentina steak, a truly inimitable masterpiece! Florence is an unbelievable spectacle where the beauties are all within reach of a pleasant walk. P.S. The last two photos were taken a year earlier, also at New Year: a completely different climate.