Car Hire Tuscany: Florence
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Quote
You can’t go to Tuscany without making a trip
to Florence, the region’s capital. Home of the Renaissance,
repository of some of the most important and affecting art in the
world, Florence welcomes visitors with extraordinary squares,
jumbles of ancient backstreets and imposing buildings in whose
salae Boccaccio, Botticelli, Dante, Machiavelli and Michelangelo
have worked and wandered.
Check out the Galleria dell’Accademia, where Michelangelo’s David broods, along with his four unfinished Prisoners and Botticelli’s Madonna and Child. Wander through one of Italy’s most visited museums, the Uffizi, to which 1.5 million people come every year to see works by Titian, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico and Rembrandt. Have your socks knocked off by the astounding Gothic Cathedral or scare yourself silly wandering in its spooky crypt. And walk the span of the Ponte Vecchio (“Old Bridge”), with its maze of shops and clusters of padlocks locked by lovers to the tumbledown fences – the padlocks are symbolic of eternal love, their keys thrown into the Arno to bond the partners forever.
Get out of the city centre and spend a day in the Boboli Gardens: or watch the setting sun paint the Duomo and Florence’s medieval walls a rich Renaissance orange from the hilltop church of San Miniato al Monte. Enjoy the trattorias and gelaterias that abound in the city’s mazes of streets and lose yourself in an Aladdin’s cave of jewellery, made using traditional Florentine goldsmithing methods.
Florence is ideally located for day trips or even weekends out in the Tuscan country. Drive south from the city and you’ll hit the wonderful hill town of Montepulciano, with its crust of red buildings tumbling across the ridge of Monte Poliziano. Continue for a few kilometres and you will enter Pienza, a once-ancient hill town transformed by Pope Pius II into a prototype modern village: the perfect place for a mid-morning stroll, along streets that epitomise the last word in Renaissance town planning! When you’re done, find a spot of lunch in a genuine rustic eatery before making a loop back up through the northwest to San Gimignano. Here you’ll encounter one of the most famous skylines in Italy – not a modern downtown centre, but a forest of medieval towers, legacies of rival Tuscan families who tried to outdo each other in building the tallest structures in the area.
However you spend the Florentine part of your trip, you’ll find one visit just isn’t enough. As you leave its warmly coloured walls, the round red dome of the Duomo, the muttering Arno, the villages, farms and villa estates in the surrounding countryside, you’ll find it takes a strong will not to turn around and drive back for a second helping.
Check out the Galleria dell’Accademia, where Michelangelo’s David broods, along with his four unfinished Prisoners and Botticelli’s Madonna and Child. Wander through one of Italy’s most visited museums, the Uffizi, to which 1.5 million people come every year to see works by Titian, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico and Rembrandt. Have your socks knocked off by the astounding Gothic Cathedral or scare yourself silly wandering in its spooky crypt. And walk the span of the Ponte Vecchio (“Old Bridge”), with its maze of shops and clusters of padlocks locked by lovers to the tumbledown fences – the padlocks are symbolic of eternal love, their keys thrown into the Arno to bond the partners forever.
Get out of the city centre and spend a day in the Boboli Gardens: or watch the setting sun paint the Duomo and Florence’s medieval walls a rich Renaissance orange from the hilltop church of San Miniato al Monte. Enjoy the trattorias and gelaterias that abound in the city’s mazes of streets and lose yourself in an Aladdin’s cave of jewellery, made using traditional Florentine goldsmithing methods.
Florence is ideally located for day trips or even weekends out in the Tuscan country. Drive south from the city and you’ll hit the wonderful hill town of Montepulciano, with its crust of red buildings tumbling across the ridge of Monte Poliziano. Continue for a few kilometres and you will enter Pienza, a once-ancient hill town transformed by Pope Pius II into a prototype modern village: the perfect place for a mid-morning stroll, along streets that epitomise the last word in Renaissance town planning! When you’re done, find a spot of lunch in a genuine rustic eatery before making a loop back up through the northwest to San Gimignano. Here you’ll encounter one of the most famous skylines in Italy – not a modern downtown centre, but a forest of medieval towers, legacies of rival Tuscan families who tried to outdo each other in building the tallest structures in the area.
However you spend the Florentine part of your trip, you’ll find one visit just isn’t enough. As you leave its warmly coloured walls, the round red dome of the Duomo, the muttering Arno, the villages, farms and villa estates in the surrounding countryside, you’ll find it takes a strong will not to turn around and drive back for a second helping.
