When you’re travelling for the first time, when you’re not too experienced with foreign cities, foreign maps, foreign street signs… the manner of your arrival can really have an impact on your opinion of the place.

Things couldn’t have gone worse when we turned up in Florence. Having had a grim night’s sleep in the grim place that is Pisa, we were already feeling tired and short-tempered, and any chance of a hopeful mood looking forward to a considerable improvement in locale was shattered fairly quickly after our arrival. After a wander around looking for a map in the train station we ended up buying one from a stall just outside the station, located the road our hotel was on (Viale Francesco Redi), and set off to look out for our hotel. Now it’s perhaps unlikely that anyone reading this will have ever walked the whole length of Viale F. Redi, but let me assure those of you that haven’t had the displeasure, that it is a VERY long road, and it was also a VERY hot day, and our bags were VERY heavy. To cut a very, very long story short, it wasn’t until we reached number 239 after walking for a couple of kilometres down the same road that we realised the house numbers were going up… 241, 243… and our hotel was number 1. A local builder had never heard of our hotel, and kept saying “long… long… very long… many kilometres”, and let me remind you he was working on the same road as the hotel was situated! In the end we had to get a taxi, the taxi itself took a full 10 minutes to get us back to the other end of the road; the end we’d first walked past merely minutes after leaving the train station. We weren’t aware that we’d got to the hotel until the taxi man opened his door and got out. Looking around, we saw nothing, but he confidently pointed us to a conspicuous large wooden door, completely nondescript with just the tiniest of brass plaques on one side exclaiming it to be the home of our hotel… along with twenty or more other brass plaques for the residents of the other flats within the building! Sigh… not a great start at all!

So bearing that absolutely horrible start in mind, you can read a lot into the fact that looking back, Florence is without a doubt one of the most amazing and loved places we visited, and it was so fresh, so wonderful that within mere hours (and a long shower of course) the pain of finding the hotel had already been forgotten.

We got out of the hotel and walked into the centre of Florence, which is much closer (and believe me, I’m aware that that’s a pretty ambiguous word to use) than the city maps seem to suggest. The incredible heat that had been such a hindrance to us in the morning now became the ideal beautiful conditions to discover the city in. I still remember turning a corner and seeing the fabulous Il Duomo (the Dome) of the Cathedral of Florence, the Santa Maria del Fiore, having to squint up to admire it in the midday sun – what an amazing backdrop to such an amazing piece of architecture! The inside of the Cathedral is just as impressive. It’s utterly grand inside, staring around at the sheer amount of different artists who have worked on it in centuries past is very humbling indeed.

Just outside was the impressive and very tall bell tower, Giotto’s Campanile. Having heard stories from my mother, we were willing to pay the slightly-steep asking price of €6 each to climb the 441 steps; very tiring but ultimately rewarding, with some absolutely cracking views of the top of Florence from all angles around the bell tower’s peak. Coming down was a lot easier, but not after a good rest at the top to catch our breath and dry up some sweat!

After the Cathedral and bell tower, we walked round semi-aimlessly (planning to ‘do’ most of the sights the following day) but quickly ended up in Piazza della Signoria, a beautiful and large square filled with an incredible amount of statues whose creators read like a ‘Who’s Who?’ of sculpture – Michaelangelo, Donatello (okay, so more of a ‘Who’s Who?’ of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!). Some of them are recommissioned faithful copies of the originals (eg. Michaelangelo’s David) but the magic was definitely still very much intact. So many amazing statues, and not at all boring either (Cellini’s Perseus, holding aloft a decapitated head… De Rossi’s Hercules and Diomedes all a-groping each other round the gonads!).

Which excitement left us very hungry, and Florence really comes into its own here. In so many European cities (and this is very obvious in English cities), the best places to eat are in the popular areas, and if you walk down side alleys looking for a cheap restaurant, you’re likely to suffer a lower quality of food and/or service in exchange for saving some money. Not Florence. Whilst you’re obviously going to be partially paying for the location if you dine at any of the restaurants that border the big squares, take a walk down a few side streets and you’ll find that these restaurants are still serving up the most incredible pizzas, ice creams and coffees, often with a welcome small-time homely feel. We only had to walk perhaps 30 seconds from the Piazza della Signoria before we were able to dine on a fantastic pizza, a beer and an espresso, all for €7.50. Not bad eh?!

(continued on Day 2...)