Florence, March 9

After a Vaporetto ride to the station area, we are reacquainted with traffic.

A bus ride to Florence stops at a service plaza on the autostrada for lunch. Beautiful salads, breads and pasta dishes are quite different from American highway fast food. The bus drops us off near our hotel, which turns out to have been a monastery in the 1300s. Lovely room with a curtained canopy bed and courtyard view.

Across the piazza is a former home for unwanted children. Those who could not manage another child could place the baby in a slot in a horizontal wheel called the 'roti' and turn it to deliver the child to the home. It was possible to include an item with the child - say a coin or a document divided in half - which would allow identification to reclaim the baby should your situation improve. A rather bizarre pawn, if you will.

A short walk down the Via dei Servi is the piazza holding the Cathedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore or as it's known, the Duomo. The third longest nave in Christendom, crowned by Brunelleschi's dome, the inspiration for later church domes. When the church was built it was open, without a dome, because no one had built one since the Pantheon in Rome. 

Brunelleschi came up with a way which in essence was like building an igloo, stacking bricks in a herringbone pattern between vertical, curving inward ribs. But it took 14 years to complete. 

In the 18th century, the exterior was covered in pink, green and white marble - for some reason. We learned that originally the plan was to place statues around the perimeter of the nave outside and that Michelangelo's David was the first sculpture created. But it never made it to the top. For those who said the David's proportions are off, a copy was made and hoisted to its intended spot, where the viewing angle corrects the perceived problem.

Tonight, our group enjoys a Tuscan meal. The bread is bland, because there is no salt in the dough, owing to a centuries-old feud with Venice over salt. The primi pasta had wild boar sauce (pesto pasta for us), the segundi was roast boar, flamed with brandy, but pretty rare, it appeared. (We had salmon.) After dessert we had a choice of limoncello or grappa. I went for the limoncello, Chanda tried the grappa, which is a lot like moonshine, it seems.