Florence is only about an hour away from Cortona, so on a recent sunny day we decided to take a road trip. Tony came with us too, so we could release him back into the wild. He was looking a little worse for the wear on the ride and I was worried about him, but as soon as we found a good spot and Larry dumped him from the jar he scrambled under a rock. Arrivederci Tony!

It was a beautiful afternoon. We spent some time strolling along the Arno, had lunch at the piazza in front of the Palazzo Vecchio being watched over by David (or, a replica of him anyway), and then spent the afternoon among the Renaissance masters at the Uffizi: Botticelli, Michelangelo, DaVinci, Raphael and Caravaggio, among others. It’s a small museum but dense and requires several hours of one’s time to cover it properly. The building itself deserves careful attention. Once housing the offices for the ruling Medici family, its hallways and galleries are intricate and beautiful.

It was unfortunately already dark when we departed the Uffizi (these shorter days are really putting a crimp in our sightseeing!), but we visited Piazza Santa Croce for an outside look at the beautiful church which is the resting place of Michelangelo, Galileo, Rossini, and others, and then took a trip to the nearby Vivoli, site of the famous Italian gelato. I ordered a rice (sort of like rice pudding in ice cream form) and chocolate gelatos; Larry had chocolate mousse and coconut. We both had our first introduction to Italian gelato at Vivoli when we visited Florence right after high school. We discovered a whole new level of ice cream on that trip. Goodbye Baskin Robbins, I’ve found a new friend! But honestly as much as we fondly remember it, we’ve had so many amazing gelatos in recent years (New York has some amazing gelato shops) that it wasn’t quite as good as we remembered. Still, fun to be back in a place that held so many nostalgic memories for us.