Florence, Italy

Florence is a lovely, quiet city in central Italy.  It makes for a great stopping point between travel from northern Italy (such as Venice) and central Italy (such as Rome).  I visited Florence near the end of August and it did not seem to crowded, plus a lot of shops had deep discounts due to it being the end of tourist season.

A lot of what makes Florence great is its architecture and art.  So if those two don’t appeal to you, you may want to skip this Italian city and visit another nearby instead (such as Bologna).  My highlights were visiting the Uffizi gallery (considered to house the greatest collection of Italian and Florentine art in the world), seeing Michelangelo’s David, street shopping, eating gelato and  seeing the Ponte Vecchio.  I think that three days is enough time to speed in Florence.  The Uffizi can take a whole day to go through but after that, no sight will consume more than an hour or so.  The David is located Galleria dell’ Accademia and is the main thing to see there (the rest of the Galleria dell’ Accademia won’t take much time to go through, if you decide to even go through the rest).  Which leads me to the one downer about Florence and its art.  Florence seems to have kept certain masterpieces at different museums and thus causes the visitor to have to purchase multiple museum tickets to the various museums (and the tickets aren’t cheap).  But other than that, no compliants from me about Florence.

If you decide to visit Florence, I highly recommend you do some shopping and visit Marsili’s chess store.  The owner, Tommaso Marsili, is extremely friendly and provides great customer service.  When I was in Florence, visited Marsili’s store and decided to purchase a chess set.  However, I wanted to think about it for a day before I made the purchase.  Unfortunately, when I returned the next day (and my final day in Florence) the store was closed that day.  I was disappointed and so when I was in Rome, and still thinking about the chess set, I decided to email Marsili and described the chess set that I liked and asked if he could mail it to me in Rome.  Marsili said yes and quickly shipped me the package (since I was only in Rome a few days before heading back to the States).  When I got the package, it was a different set than I had in mind (my description of the set I wanted was vague and so I don’t fault Marsili at all).  When I arrived back in the States, I thanked Marsili for quickly shipping the package and briefly mentioned that I provided him the wrong description of the set I wanted.  Marsili replied and sent me pictures of four similar sets that he had (b/c the one I wanted had sold out in the meantime) and offered to ship me one of the similar sets for FREE.  This was a very generous offer given that the sets I was interested in were under $100 and shipping to the U.S. from Italy was around $50.  I took up Marsili on his offer and now happily have two chess sets from him.  Sorry for the long story but I just wanted to publicize Marsili’s store and the great customer service he provides…hope you visit him.

For general information about travel to Europe see here.

(FYI – I traveled in Florence during August 2006.)

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