In cities like Firenze, nature did it for them.

Sadly (dammit, dammit, dammit) we departed from my home city of Roma Aeterna this morning and I shall probably not get to see it again for at least a couple of years. (Note from the future: it turned out to be about three; I didn't return until 2019. Of course I'm writing this in 2021 in the Time of Covid, so...)

On the plus side I really love Firenze as well, and we headed there on the Frecciarossa, one of the Italian very fast trains. So comfortable (well, it could actually do with some luggage racks for suitcases which aren't 6 feet off the ground, and truly the free coffee that we were served in business class was an abomination that bordered on a mortal sin, but aside from that...), so fast, so smooth. Truly it is a piece of engineering to be admired. Which is more than can be said for the Italian railway stations which don't tell you which platform the train is coming in on until it's about three minutes out. And invariably your carriage is going to be down the far end, which means hordes of passengers sprinting madly across the station and down the platform to get on in the five minutes or so that they have before the train pulls out for its next destination. In Switzerland they have trains assigned to platforms, I kid you not, six months before they even run. How do I know this? Look at the Swiss timetable. You will see platform information for each train for the entire period that the timetable covers (usually 3 to 6 months out). Yes, Swiss trains cost a gorram fortune to ride on, but you can't fault their efficiency.

Given its fame, its wealth of artwork and its status as one of the principal centres of the Renaissance, most people probably assume that Firenze is a large city. However the population is less than 400,000 people. In Australian terms that makes it about the same size as Canberra, the Australian capital.

A lot of people bag out Canberra, but I quite like the place. It's neat, compact, well serviced and easy to get around in. Firenze is similar although perhaps a little less easy to get around in since it dates back hundreds of years rather than tens of years and the layers of history show. (Also Canberra had the advantage of being designed after cars made their first appearance.)

In this case I couldn't resist getting a shot of the dramatic sky over the river Arno looking from the Ponte alle Grazie toward the Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge in the city.

My chief regret is that we lacked the time to go to a proper Florentine steakhouse (I even had one picked out), though the restaurant that we went to on the second night did a pretty nice Florentine steak, even if it wasn't its speciality.

As with everything else, our time here was far too limited. We got in the morning of this shot and had the rest of the day here. But the following day we had to leave our residence (a very attractive and comfortable apartment just across from the main station) at dawn to do a day trip to Cinque Terre. As that was an all day trip we had very little time in Firenze on the second day, and pretty much none on the third when we had to head to Milano.