Final day in Florence - another catch-up post (sorry!)

Last day in Florence – I promised I would post this.

Our last day in Florence turned out to be the perfect way to goodbye to the city. It also happened to be my (Corey) birthday. So I was able to choose the day's activities.

Before I start, let me quickly mention a few things about our hotel's free breakfast. They offer a free continental breakfast every morning from like 8:30 to 10:30. But it seems like just a few guests know about it, so we head down there at like 8:30, enjoy a bowl of cereal, juice, coffee, a couple of croissants, some muffins. Pretty much 2 of everything. Then we grab several croissants and muffins to go and maybe a couple of packages of Nutella. That way we don't have to pack a big lunch. I just thought that I'd note that for posterity's sake.

Anyways, the first thing we do is enjoy a nice breakfast, and then head to the Duomo to walk the 470 steps to the top. It doesn't actually seem that bad once you start walking. We were able to see how the architect was able to the build the dome. He actually built two domes – one for support. Before he came on the project, no one could figure out how to build a dome that massive. About halfway up, we were able to see the fresco of the Last Judgment on the underside of the dome.

We finally made it up to the top (along with 40 other people) and saw some the best views of the city (see the earlier post on Florence pt. 2 pictures). After taking a ton of shots, we headed back down to the plaza and decided to walk back across Ponte Vecchio and spend some time on the souther side of the city. Besides being free of many tourists, the southern side of Florence is very nice. We took a great stroll up a wide boulevard lined with huge cedar trees up to the top of a hill just south of the river. We wanted to check out this massive fort atop the hill, so we continued our nice stroll down some winy narrow roads. Eventually we found the fort, but it was closed for the day, so we just continued down the road to find out where it ended. We were surprised to find that the road brought us back down to the river just a few blocks from where we started. We also ended up right in front of the hill we discussed climbing early on in the week. We found our way up to the top of the hill, where Piazza Michelangelo is (named for a bronze copy of his David statue at the center of the piazza – also in the second set of Florence pictures in a previous post.) After taking in some more gorgeous views, we went back down to the center of town and enjoyed one last excellent three course dinner at our favorite trattoria.

OK. so later I will post some thoughts on our week in Rome and post some pics of Rome.