First impression of Italy: It's not as clean as Spain. It's amazing though. There's some stunningly ancient things around in Italy-monuments mentioned in Roman times, palaces I've always heard about, major artworks just... sitting in marketplaces. But... often there's trash littering the sides of roads. It's a place of contradictions.

Once again we boated over in a tender and then bussed to our destination-Florence! The architecture of this town IS everything I've heard about. Really. It's a fairly jaw dropping place and looks like the Medieval era was yesterday even when you're standing next to a McDonald's (even the fast food places look oddly..classical).

We toured the Florence cathedral museum and saw parts of the cathedral itself-the whole thing would probably take a week alone! We saw the famed Baptistry Doors by Ghiberti-I've never wanted to paw a piece of art so badly. The door is covered with gilded high relief in unparalled detail.

The Cathedral's museum is seriously great. It's filled with bits from the Cathedral-renovated bits, statuary, old altars, models used in various renovations. We even got to see the classical David (the marketplace copy!) and a fabulous dark bronze Perseus-I bought a tiny copy of him in the marketplace. I didn't buy a copy of David since I already had a better one to take home (love you honey!).