The train was really comfortable. You also get free newspaper( we didn't get any because we don't read Italian) , free tea (not entirely sure but I've seen it being mentioned on the website), really clean and high tech toilet (where I had a problem entering the toilet T.T and having the phobia of being locked up in there and missed the rest of my trip...) and free wifi! Unfortunately I did not get to utilize the free wifi throughout the journey because you would need a local number to receive the validation code on your phone (clearly not helping the foreign tourists).
It took about two hours to get to Florence. Upon our arrival at the train station, we took a free map available at a random bus stop by the road and started finding our way to our hotel, Hotel Santa Croce. Florence is also very walkable on foot and you would walk past many of the attractions along the way if you are heading towards this hotel or Uffizi Gallery since they are all in the same direction from the train station.
What to do in Florence for one day?
It was around 2pm in the afternoon when we arrived and we had already prebooked our tickets at Uffizi Gallery which had to be collected at 2.30pm... It was quite a bit of rush but I am glad that we made it. In fact, booking tickets at Uffizi Gallery is clearly very essential to avoid to queue but you would have to pay about 3 euro of booking fee person...which might be not quite worth it if you are really travelling on a budget and have plenty of time.
Frankly speaking, Uffizi Gallery didn't really wow us. I admit that I am totally not able to appreciate arts...(Too much brain fragmented for Calculus and ODE and Stochastic Mathematical Modelling?) We actually felt sorry to Michelangelo and all the amazing artists who produced the art work in the gallery. Another reason would be the huge crowd in the gallery. You can't simply stand right in front of the paintings and stone... and appreciate them... because there would always be someone next to you, trying to catch some glimpse of the painting and probably it isn't a very nice time to slowly contemplate about the meaning behind the painting... All I remember was the Goddess of Love having a huge presence in most of the paintings that I have seen (or maybe I am naturally attracted to them)...
Probably, given another chance we would have gone for the Galileo Museum instead. Well, because we are both engineers and probably we would be very turned on by the stuff in there?
Ponte Vecchio. Another reason for us to enter Uffizi Gallery is because...you get the best view of Ponte Vecchio from here.
As we got really bored and hungry looking at the paintings, we left the Uffizi Gallery (sorry Michelangelo!) after having spent 40 minutes (or less?) in it plus possibly 30 minutes of queuing and waiting.
First we went out to get some food since we didn't manage to have anything since leaving Venice in the morning. And we also got some Italian sweets along the way. The desserts are pretty decent and they are somewhere near the pizza parlour called PizzaMan. After that we walked around Duomo and caught some pictures of this magnificent building.
The inner side of the dome
It is also possible to climb up the cathedral (or the dome?) if you are interested.
After that we made our way to Piazza Michelangelo, where you get the best view of Florence.
One of my favourite pictures from the entire trip!
There was also a pretty good gelato parlour as you climb up the stairs to get to Piazza Michelangelo. Do give it a try! (Sorry no picture because gelato was too tempting for us!)
After making our way back to the hotel, we went for this pizza restaurant near our hotel which is also recommended on Lonely Planet. The link of the restaurant is here, where the pizza is oven grilled and they have only got 3 types of pizza--Napoleon, Margherita and Marinara.
The pizza was really charred at the bottom and I don't think it is wise to eat the burnt part so I was actually picking the non-charred parts and put them into my mouth...while I saw people finishing the entire pizza including the charred bottom which made me wonder if that was actually THE Italian way?
Piazza Santa Croce which is really close to our hotel. Not having done enough research before the trip, we actually totally neglected this attraction. Only then we realised that the church in the picture, Basilica di Santa Croce is the burial place of the many notable Italians, including Michelangelo and Galileo Galilei. My boyfriend actually told me about it before we slept and I suddenly felt that "we" were actually quite close to each other and I started to feel eerie @.@. It would be great if we knew about this place earlier and we would just skip Uffizi Gallery and pay our respect to Mr Michelangelo and Mr Galilei.
Where to stay in Florence?
Hotel Santa Croce is a good hotel for the price. We got an upgrade to a larger room and we were quite happy about that. Nevertheless, the room was basic and the breakfast was quite disappointing in fact because we read a review about the hot croissants served during breakfast in the hotel... Both of us being croissant lovers ever since our trip in Paris, we were really looking forward to the "hot croissants" but unfortunately we just saw lots of cold croissants stacked on each other in the morning. They were not even warm to begin with! And probably because we were the first two to have breakfast, the breakfast was not really prepared yet. But still, for the price (50-60 euro per night) I think it is not bad.
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