Strap on your walking shoes for Florence, and go easy on the art

Florence is getting harder to love.

After a week in Burgundy, where we were often the only visitors in sight, I had hoped that Tuscany's
tourist mecca might be a bit less crowded than in past summer visits.  Nope.  While there might have been fewer couples and families, the town was awash with school groups.  Noisy, milling teenagers, blocking traffic patterns and rarely displaying any interest in what's around them.  I suppose teachers have brought them on the theory that if you throw art and architecture at 100, it might stick to a couple.  Was I ever this obnoxious on school art history trips?

More than on any other visit, sadly, the centre of Florence reminded me of Venice: a historic stage set given completely over to tourism, with no locals besides those catering to visitors.

Or maybe, on past visits, I hadn't noticed so much.  My mother was an art historian and I was raised in her interests.  We'd both forget about the crowds to happily linger in contemplation of the elegance of Ghiberti's door panels, the majesty of Brunelleschi's dome or a room full of Botticelli madonnas.  But this time was different.  This time, I was introducing my husband to Florence, desperately trying to do anything I could think of to spark some appreciation of Italian culture in him to match mine.

Now, I'm not saying my husband is a cretin.  He's well-rounded and intellectually curious.  But he is, I think, a fairly typical man, and he didn't study any art history at school.  He felt no driving need to pack in the sightseeing, and I'm fairly sure that by the fifth madonna, fresco or church facade, it was all starting to look the same to him.  I suspect he represents the majority of the population, whilst my past visits, always with the art historically obsessed, belong to a tiny niche of society.  It put a whole new light on holiday planning.  I went for what I thought was a fairly light agenda, and we still hit cultural overload pretty quickly.  The milling teenagers didn't help.

Thus we only spent two days in Florence, rather than the planned three.  (And thank God for that, as the change of Friday plan allowed us to discover car problems which, if not revealed 'til we started our drive back to France on Saturday, would have been a real issue.)  We walked around Florence's historic core, popped in to a few attractions and got in a bit of historic spectacle.  It was, the man tells me, a decent introduction.

It's fairly easy to get around Florence on foot, and if you didn't stop anywhere you could do a circular walk of the main sights in a few hours.  Starting at the Santa Maria Novella train station, pop across the plaza to the eponymous church, where you can see the one big, original late medieval church facade in town.  The Florentines had an odd habit of not finishing churches, meaning that San Lorenzo ... the next one you walk by ... is still unfinished and both the main cathedral and Santa Croce have been finished by 19th century restorers.  There's a fun street market around the side and back of San Lorenzo where you can find all the standard Florentine souvenirs:  leather goods, silk scarves, majolica pottery.  From there to the central piazza of the cathedral (duomo), where the dome, Giotto's bell tower and the far older baptistry combine to make a majestic sight, despite the heaving crowds.

Down the street to Orsanmichele, another church but this time converted from an old granary, famous for the Renaissance sculpture in its niches.  Next a little detour to the straw market, where more Florentine crafts are on sale and you're supposed to stroke the nose of the bronze wild boar to ensure your return.  The poor pig was encircled by people 20 deep, so we just gave him a nod and kept moving.  Not far from here you're beneath the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its piazza the civic heart of Florence to match the religious one up the street.  You peer down the corridor of the Uffizi, crowds streaming towards the Ponte Vecchio, but it's not time for that yet.  You need to detour a few blocks further to see Santa Croce.  Then back, over the bridge with its beguiling jewellery shops, and to the other side of the river to see the Pitti Palace.  Wander back down the Arno a bit, cross at the Ponte Santa Trinita ... from which you actually get the best view of the Ponte Vecchio, give a nod to Ferragamo's world headquarters in its Medieval townhouse, then head back to the train station.  It's possible to do this in about 3 hours; we broke it into two days, incorporating a few visits along the route.

Our first day in town was 25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation, long considered the Florentine New Year.  There's an annual procession of citizens in Renaissance costume that starts over by the straw market and winds through town until reaching the church of Santissima Annunziata.  The church is famous for a fresco of the annunciation, in legend finished by an angel while its exhausted painter slept.  I'm not sure it is truly divine, but it is certainly a lovely thing, now enveloped by a golden canopy within the only church in Florence that got the Baroque treatment.  Amongst all the Renaissance restraint this interior is actually a bit hideous.  But standing there as a whole crowd of people in period costume gathered around a young woman laying flowers at the feet of the virgin, with trumpet and drum accompaniment, was spectacular.

Earlier in the day we'd toured the Palazzo Vecchio, with its impressive progression of fresco-encrusted walls and its jaw-droppingly large main chamber.  There's a map room here of which Piers was fond.

On our second day we paid the entry fee to get into Santa Croce, most notable for its late Medieval
frescoes and its tombs of Italian greats.  Machiavelli, Galileo, Michelangelo, Rossini, and plenty of others you've never heard of.  The main altar is currently under wraps but all of the side altars are fully restored and available to view for the first time in my memory.  There's little left of the famous Giottos, but what's there is so imbued with humanity and emotion, it almost brings tears to your eyes.  While here, you can also pop into the Florentine leather school, where the craftsmanship is excellent but the prices this time seemed far higher than they used to be.  Finally, on the way out, we popped into the Pazzi Chapel.  Designed by Brunelleschi, with subtle decoration in glazed terracotta by the Della Robbias, it's a study in restrained elegance.

We spent the biggest chunk of sightseeing time at the Uffizi.  It's been at least a decade since I'd set foot inside.  It's expensive, the crowds are usually crazy, and having seen all the paintings several times, I came to prefer the much quieter Bargello museum with its sculpture and decorative arts.  But you can't introduce someone to Florence without coming to this, the cradle of Western painting and one of the greatest museums in the world.  We bought the tickets online, in advance, which allows you to skip some lines but is still spectacularly inefficient, in that you still have to wait at Door 3 to show off your reservation and have tickets printed for you, before crossing the courtyard to get into the shorter queue at Door 2.  In other countries, you just print your own ticket with a unique bar code and the guy at the door scans it.  This screamed of job creation schemes, while the ticket was almost 30% more expensive than buying it on the day.  That said, the queues of the non-reserved were spectacularly long and filled with tired and grumpy people.  The extra expenditure was worth it.

Turns out the museum is in the middle of a long, slow upgrade they're calling the Uffizi Nuovo, meant to more than double the display space and allow them to get the wealth of stuff in storage onto permanent display.  So now, instead of completing the long "u" of galleries on the top floor of the building, you reach a new cafe with a magnificent rooftop dining area in the shadow of the Palazzo Vecchio's bell tower.  Had I known of its existence, I would have scheduled a lunch break here, as there are few more dramatic views in Florence.  I hit this old end point of the galleries, wondering where the Caravaggios were, then got directed down a modernistic, over-sized staircase made in a vast well hollowed out of the old building.  You descend one floor, and they then take you back around the whole "U" again, with those Caravaggios at the very end to give you the energy to keep pushing.  On the way you pass the Bronzinos, Baroque art, Northern European stuff and whatever special exhibition is under way, along with a progression of spare, modern galleries still empty and being finished.

I have mixed feelings about the changes.  Given how much of the collection has always been in storage, it's exciting to think of what's going to be accessible once it's all out.  They've done a great job on the new galleries and they show of the art beautifully.  But they've doubled the size of the museum while still maintaining the original chronological journey.  One gallery after another, with no choice but to follow the progression from start to finish.  Even I was flagging at the end, and I'm the museum kid.  Piers was downright grumpy.  Although he was cheered by the oddity of Bronzino's naked dwarf portrait, and Caravaggio's chill-inducing Medusa shield, both towards the end.  But I can't help thinking that, with the museum now so big, taking a hint from the Louvre and building an underground concourse from which you could access all the wings of the museum at your own pace, in whatever order you wished, would have made more sense.  With the old path remaining, my big advice is to plan on a break in that lovely cafe.  You're going to need it if you want to keep your energy up for the second half of the museum.