Florence is a city full of art, architecture and anatomical curiosities, and lots and lots of meat! We spent three days trying to get the most of all of it :)

And Florence has gold, lots and lots of gold. Every building is basically a palace full of art and gold. On our first day, we wandered for hours around the endless rooms of the Palazzo Pitti which was next to our hotel, impressed and almost overwhelmed by the excess of statues, paintings and frescoes in a golden glow.

Every room was covered from top to bottom in paintings!

Meanwhile the golden sun was pouring through the windows, and there were amazing views over the city.

In addition to the hundreds and hundreds of paitings, the Palazzo Pitti also houses many statues and furniture, and even a whole wing dedicated to costumes and fashion!

But apart from the abundance of art, the building itself is also magnificent. Huge chandeliers, stairways, giant dining rooms…

… and an enoooormous garden overlooking the city, why not!

And we hadn’t even seen the city yet! So we walked over the famous Ponto Vecchio towards the Duomo, passing through streets filled with market and statues. We had lunch at a very nice pizza place!

The Duomo is a very impressive building, not just because of its enormous size, but the patterns on the exterior and detail in the statues, and the unbelievably long line of tourists trying to get in!

Instead of waiting for hours in line, we opted for climbing the bell tower next to it to get a beautiful view over the city and the Duomo.

With the added extra of the deafening sounds of the bells actually ringing while we were up there!

Florence is full of musea and palazzi, and we visited one building full of statues that used be a former prison. Prison or not, ofcourse everything looked gorgeous.

The museum displayed some very cool armor pieces as well!

Every single building in Florence seems to hold some golden surprises. We went into a bookstore, and discovered it was built inside an old cinema! They were playing old silent documentaries about Italy, including a Dutch one!

For our last day in Florence, I really wanted to see something entirely different but unique to Florence: La Specola. This is Florence’s natural history museum, and as all the other buildings in Florence it was beautiful, with large staircases and endless hallways full of minerals, animals, plants…

But the main reason I wanted to come here was to see the infamous collection of wax anatomical figures… If you have a weak stomach you might want to skip this section. I had no idea how impressive and uncomfortable this visit would be!

Before photography existed, to learn anatomy, arists in Florence started to study dead bodies and recreating them as accurately as possible in wax. That in itself is very impressive, but the most eerie part of it is that, in tradition with all the art you see around Florence, these medical artists wanted to give the wax figures a certain “flair”, posing them in elegant ways as if they are statues.

Room after room full of wax bodies, some in pieces, each room dedicated to a different aspect of the human body.

The walls were full of drawings, similar to walls of the Palazzo Pitti.

I just kept remembering myself that there were not real bodies, but wax figures, until the guide told us that the fingertips were actually from real people.

So impressive but so uncomfortable, I will never forget this visit.

If you want some inspiration for your next horror game, here you go:

Sooooo after this enlightening visit, we craved a bit more of that Renaissance art and we went to the (overcrowded) Uffizi Gallery. After standing in line for 1,5 hours for a timeslot we booked in advance (I can’t even imagine what this is like if you visit during high season!), we finally accessed the most famous gallery of Florence/Italy/Europe. It displays works of basically every famous artist in the world, including Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rafael, Caravaggio, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, need I go on?

Now, this place was so insanely crowded, with lines inside in front of all famous works, that we did not take a lot of photos! But at least we have the famous Medusa:

Now for the bonus round: FOOD!

Ofcourse we ate tons of food, but I didn’t realize Florence is very meat-heavy! We tried the famous “Florentine Steak” which was… unforgettable:

We got a certificate of the cow as well

So I did not have to eat for a week.

A fantastic inspiration and golden trip to Florence!