Day 6 Florence

Another lovely day! We've decided that Florence is adult Disneyland. When we were here 22 years ago, we weren't able to experience the amazing food in the way that we can now. Sarah cannot eat gluten so she researched all of the restaurants that had gluten-free pastas and pizza dough and could understand what it means to have celiac disease.

We started the day with coffee at the cafe near our old school. The exact same people work in the shop since, like many places here, it's family owned.

We wandered toward a Van Gogh exhibit I wanted to see after visited the Van Gogh museum. This exhibit was a multi-media show inside an old church. There was no original art but rather projections of Van Gogh's work in mostly chronological order with excerpts from his letters to his brother to explain where Van Gogh was psychologically at the time of each set of paintings. The show was set to music. It was a good compliment to the Van Gogh museum but definitely not a substitute for it.

We saw this art on our way:

We then ended up at a leather bag shop staffed by a British woman and Sarah bought lots of stuff. I found a purse and something for Sonia. It was fun. So then we were hungry again and headed to another place with gluten free options:

We made it to the Van Gogh exhibit then went home for a late afternoon break. We left again at 7pm and listened to Rick Steves' Renaissance Florence walking tour.  The tour ended at the Ponte Vecchio so we wandered over to the Oltrarno neighborhood on the other side for more delicious food. We are now on the Italian schedule and ate dinner at 9pm. The streets were mostly empty except for a lot of police. We asked one police officer what was going on. Apparently the head of the Italian right-wing party was at a meeting. He is a controversial fellow and therefore, the police had to make sure he was safe and that there were no big protests. It was pretty quiet. I saw the sign for the political party but apparently mis-read it because I asked the officer if he was against tourism. No, the guy laughed and said he is against immigration -- seems like that movement has swept south. Although the officer did say the party didn't have much support in Tuscany.