Florence from the hotel tower, sunset
Our legs are sore today. Good thing there is no more hiking on steep trails. We left Monterosso, walking to the little train station, with our luggage following in a miniscule truck. We took the train to a nearby town that was big enough to accommodate a tour bus. The bus took us to Florence, with a stop at the touching and sobering American cemetery. We had seen the one in Normandy, but did not know about this. There are others like this all over Europe. It brought home the enormity of the horrible war. The graves were mostly very young men who had gone on bombing missions, knowing they were unlikely to return, sometimes taking only enough fuel for one way so they could carry more bombs.
Florence itself is magnificent. We are staying in a hotel built 1300 to 1500 in the old area. It seems we’ve been transported back to the time of the Medicis and everything looks like a palazzo. We had a walking tour of the area, briefly interrupted by a parade of the Rotary Club in Renaissance regalia. Everything is right in the neighborhood--the Palazzo Vecchio, the Ponte Vecchio (everything here is “Vecchio” (old)), the famous dome, and capped it all with Michelangelo’s David.
At sunset we went to the top of the hotel’s tower—every good Renaissance building has a tower—for a view of the city in all directions.