Have I mentioned the weather? For the three days I was in Rome and the first two days in Firenze it was sunny and warm, in the mid-70's. The next two days were partly cloudy to cloudy with some light drizzle and gentle rain. This day we awoke to a pounding downpour, coming down by the bucketful. We have a totally inadequate umbrella - it packs up nicely for travel, though. It continued to rain savagely until we emerged from the Uffizi late in the afternoon. Speaking of which...

Our big excursion for the day was the unparalleled Galleria degli Uffizi, where we had a reservation for 13:00. Without a reservation, the wait to enter is about 3-½ hours. With one, at the entirely reasonable cost of an additional €3 over the usual €9.50 cost of entrance, the wait is considerably shorter, although not altogether eliminated. We hung out at the hotel until the time to set out arrived.

The Galleria is located just off the Piazza della Signoria, a large square with its own fascinating history. It turns out that if you dig anywhere in Firenze, about 3 to 4 meters down you run into Roman ruins - they're everywhere! This perhaps is not too startling considering the proximity of Firenze to Rome. Under the paving stones of the Piazza lie the remains of the Roman Forum at Firenze, discovered only in the 20^th century during routine maintenance of the subsurface infrastructure by the municipal public works department. You can read all about it elsewhere.

We arrived at the Galleria 30 minutes early to buy our reserved tickets and queue up for our scheduled 13:00 entry, which we accomplished by 12:45. The queue we joined (the reserved one) already stretched for 30 meters, and the Galleria staff were letting in a bolus of 25 or so people at a time. We were the lucky ones - the unreserved queue stretched for 150 meters to the end of the building and around it. An hour later, we did make it inside. Passing through a security zone reminiscent of airports, we climbed the four flights of broad, carpeted stairs to the top of the Galleria, where the collection is housed, and began our tour.

The Galleria is a U-shaped edifice, with each of the long arms of the U stretching for 200 meters from one end to the other - standing at one end you can just see the other end as a vanishing point shrouded in mist - a visceral demonstration of the Florentine innovation of perspective in their art. The cross piece of the U measures 40 meters. Each of the 3 segments comprises a 10-meter wide corridor with spacious display rooms opening off to the left.

The profusion of artworks is beyond adequate description - but ever overconfident, I will make the attempt. Out in the corridors, the ceiling is subdivided into 5-meter wide concavities, the curving surfaces of which are densely illuminated with portraiture, still and dynamic landscapes, and riotously intertwining vines, leaves, and flowers. Taking into account the total length of the three corridors, about 440 meters, the number of these ceiling vaults comes to almost 90.  Not one of them duplicated the artwork on any other, as far as I could tell without snapping my cervical vertebrae from the contorted posture necessary to view them. Further, a wide ledge about 2 meters down from the ceiling along both walls of the corridors served to display 4-foot high framed portraits of kings, queens, nobles, luminaries, and clerics of the Renaissance, one after the other in seemingly unending procession. On average, there were 12 of these every 20 meters, for an estimated total of over 500 of them. Finally, about every 3 meters or so along both sides of the corridor, Roman and Greek statuary brought up from Rome and elsewhere by the Medicis was displayed at floor level - my estimate of their total number runs to about 300. This before we entered a single display room, of which there are almost 40, each packed with masterpiece upon masterpiece! As one moves from room to room, the artwork displayed is of later and later origin, so that the evolution of Florentine Renaissance style is revealed.

You can read about the Uffizi artwork elsewhere - suffice it to say that we began our tour about 13:45 and left the Galleria about 17:30, although by 16:30 I had reached a state of cultural overload. I fear that I did not do justice to the art I viewed in the final hour - the part of my back between the shoulder blades was burning fiercely from hours of craning the neck upwards to view massive paintings by Giotto, Martini, Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Reubens, et al., ad infinitum. By the time I got to Reubens even my anticipatory prurient interest in his lushly fleshed nudes had been crushed. We ultimately exited through a series of gift and souvenir shops, where I made a few modest purchases to remind me of what I could not possibly recall in detail, and headed for dinner.

My wife once again had topped her previous performances with the guidebook and had gotten us a reservation at the Osteria della Congrega a few hundred meters northwest of the Duomo, somewhat off the beaten path. It is a lovely, intimate ristorante with only ten tables and an earthy interior richly decorated in rustic Tuscan style. The food was again fabulous, the other guests engaged in genteel, subdued conversation, and we lingered there for over two hours before returning to the hotel to read, relax, and retire.