Day 3

Today was pretty relaxing! We had the breakfast by the Duomo that we missed yesterday, which was lovely. It was kind of overcast and threatening all day, so we took the umbrellas and jackets and sneakers. But luckily we didn't *really* get down-poured on at all.

We started off with a leisurely stroll where I played tour guide and tried to remember all I could to tell Scott about the stuff we were seeing that I saw on my tour the day before. We went into the Santa Croce church and museum and it was really cool! There were a ton of crypts of famous Florentines. Lesson learned: ALWAYS take the Rick Steve's Guidebook along. We totally missed that Michelangelo and Galelio are buried there. Incidentally, Scott kept taking pictures of all these Roman Numeral signs bc he was going to "figure out when they died" back home, and he took one of Galelio! Good Call Scott! Dante Alligheri and Machiavelli are also there. The church also has lots of frescos, which are kind of like big murals that took months and months to make. It's really amazing that some of them are in such good shape bc they're so old.

After the church, we strolled around again and found some yummy lunch. Afterwards, Scott headed back to the conference and I to the Accedemia to see the REAL David statue.

L'Accademia was pretty small. I didn't 100% know if I was going to want to see it, so I did not reserve tickets ahead of time. Well, that was kind of a mistake - I waited in line for 1 hour! It was painful, only bc I had some sort of high school student field trip RIGHT behind me. They were just as loud and obnox as US HS students, if not more so. Luckily I brought a book along so I could tune them out a little. The museum itself was great though. I downloaded a few Rick Steves (free) mp3 itunes podcasts, which is like a free tour from Rick. It rocked.

The coolest part of the Accademia was seeing the David (which is HUUUGE) and it's at the end of a hall that's peppered with some other sculptures that Michelangelo was working on that were never finished. Just seeing the amount of time and work that goes into making a statue out of marble is pretty daunting.

For dinner we headed off in a different direction, after consulting all kinds of guidebooks and maps, we decided - eh, it's too hard to find these places! We headed toward the Palazzo Vecchio and went down a back alley and crossed our fingers. OMG. It was soooo yummy. It was a lot more authentic than the places we've eaten so far, and since we were sitting beside real Italians I felt a little weird taking a pic of my food. I started out with the special of the day, Tortelli something, with "truffle" sauce. I kept seeing this around and thought I should try it. Seriously weird but soo good! It has chocolate in the sauce, and garlic. It sounds gross, I know. But it was fabulous. We also had some roasted chicken Scott described as the best chicken he's ever had. We had a bottle of the house wine too, and it was also (surprise!) really good!!

We DID follow the advice of the Rick Steves guide book on a good place to get gelato bc there are seriously soo many to choose from, and we were curious as to what "top of the line" gelato is like. So we went to a place called Grom which is close to the Duomo and gave them a try. It was awesome, we're so going back there tonight. I got dark chocolate and stracciatella (chocolate chips) and Scott got something that was vanilla w/ chocolate and biscuits in it - YUM! Then we ate it on the steps of the Duomo! It was a fabulous evening...