So today was our last day in Florence and we drove down to our hotel in Tuscany. My thoughts on Florence.

Unfortunately, both Cris and I agree that Florence was a little underwhelming. From my perspective, I feel like I’m comparing everything we see to Amsterdam, which may be my favorite city we’ve ever visited. Florence is definitely a beautiful city with a great deal of history to appreciate. One thing that stuck out in my mind were the extremely old streets “paved” with large stones fit together, which trumped the cobblestone streets of the old towns in the US. Very, very old world.

In a weird sort of way, Florence is most beautiful when viewed from a distance. The times when we were able to stand at a higher point in the city and look at it with a landscape view is when it really shown. The walk up 463 steps to the top of the Duomo dome was completely worth it as that might have been the best view that we saw while we were there. There were a couple of other places where the vistas were truly impressive, like when we went to the Boboli Gardens and looked back at the Duomo from there.

The problem with Florence comes when you look at it a little closer. For a city that old with as much history, you would think that its citizens would have much more consideration and pride for it. The city is kind of dirty with graffiti everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere; even on some of the oldest, most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen. It was really quite sad to see. There was also a serious dog feces problem there. Before we went to Amsterdam we heard from multiple people that there was dog pooh everywhere, but never saw any. Don’t hear anything about it in Florence, and it was everywhere to the point where you have to constantly look down while you walk, and take care not to get hit by a car or scooter when you step off the sidewalk to dodge it.

I also didn’t have the best vibe from the people there. I always felt like someone was trying to sell me something or get me to come into their restaurant to buy their food. And it wasn’t as if they were saying, “come in here so you can eat good food.” They were simply saying “come eat in here so I can make a buck.” No warmth or welcome, but just buy crap from us. Its sort of funny because I felt like the Italians in Florence had the sort of arrogance that the French are always stereotyped as having. It also sat a little poorly with me that every single Italian guy we passed looked Cris up and down in a completely obvious way. I’m usually not very territorial when it comes to her, but when you’re trying to have a nice romantic honeymoon in Italy and every Italian dude you pass is trying to undress your new wife with his eyes, it makes it a little difficult. Cris thinks I’m overreacting, but she wasn’t paying attention.

Other random bits I didn’t like about Florence. All of the museums charged a decent sum (18 eruo or almost $25 dollars per person) and none of them took credit cards, which is annoying. The Galleria Academia, which is where Michealangelo’s David is, is way overrated and exists solely for the purpose of displaying the David, which really is impressive by the way. The Uffizi, which is the premier museum in Florence, was disappointing in comparison to the National Gallery in London or the Muse de Orsay in Paris. If you’re a premier museum, you shouldn’t have your paintings arranged so that people have a hard time viewing them because of glare from the lights on the paintings. That’s just amateur crap.

Some positives from our time in Florence. I really did like the David and I was much more impressed with it than the Mona Lisa. As Lewis Black says, Jesus is real big in Italy and the most beautiful example of this adoration is the Chiesa Santo Spirito. Completely unassuming from the outside, the inside is truly beautiful with a lot of religious paintings around the walls and an incredibly ornate alter area. The Palazzo Pitti, where the Medici, family used to live, is really an incredible place. We lucked into and loved the private free tour of the royal apartments and the royal bathrooms. They also had a costume museum that had Italian clothes from the Medici family on, that Cris really dug. And lastly, Cris was thoroughly pleased with her find of a gelateria that had 71 different flavors of geleto. For Cris, gelato is happiness in a cup…or cone.