Florence, Thursday, 22 May, Day 29

Slept in today, thanks to the most comfortable bed so far. 

After a great breakfast care of the hard working Nona who runs the Albergo, we headed off, first stop the Church of San Marco, where Girolamo_Savonarola used to preach,  then over to the Bargello Museum of sculpture and other stuff. An exhibition there of the work of a Renaissance Florentine rival of Michelangelo,  Bartolommeo_Bandinelli, an extraordinarily prolific and talented painter and sculptor who I confess I had never heard of.  As well as the collection of sculpture, there is also a great collection of armour and weapons, including pikes with a pistol like flint lock fire arm incorporated at the business end. Extraordinary the amount of ornamentation that went into devices whose primary purpose was to kill fellow humans.

After lunch we made use of some of the local businesses - the Internet café to print out our Uffizi tickets, and the laundromat - then headed of to the Museum of Archaeology. This has a terrific collection of Etruscan stuff, presented in a way that gives a sense of the context in which at least some of the objects were found.  A really great collection, beautifully conserved. One of the most spectacular items is the Chimera_of_Arezzo, a bronze statue dating from around 400 BC, which was buried along with a hoard of other bronzes probably sometime in antiquity, and discovered in 1553.

As well as the big ticket items, there are smaller things that are just as fascinating, like the glass fronted cabinets of tiny bronze statuettes, all beautifully arranged. Here are 5 little  ducks with various sized beaks, here are about a dozen little Apollo like figures, here are 8 dogs and so on. You get the feeling that what you are seeing is the fruit of centuries of assiduous collecting.

A beautiful evening so we had dinner at one of the outside tables in the Trattoria next door. The lady who runs the Albergo joined us for a while, and we had a nice chat considering her English is not much better than our Italian.

Seems it is going to rain tomorrow. Hard to believe as we seem to have been in glorious sunshine for so long. Last day in Florence tomorrow and a few things we would like to visit, weather and energy permitting.