Odds and Ends

We hadn't quite finished with Firenze. There is the Ponte Vecchio, which is an inhabited bridge, much like the Ponte rialto in Venezia. Mostly gold, leather and jewelry merchants---

  
Outside on the left--inside on the right

Here is a nice(?) little feature from the Galileo museum. It is his (middle) finger. I like to think that he was expressing his opinion about the (holy) inquisition when he lost it.



Now it is terribly hot in the afternoons (and has been for the summer apparently-very dry heat) , so in our collective wisdom we decided to take the car to some quaint hill top dorf  and have dinner there.
We told Serena (our faithful navigator) to avoid motorways and set off for San Miniato. Our obedient servant promptly took us on a tour of the florentine suburbs, since that was indeed the only way to avoid the autostrade. Pressure,pressure, it was rush hour. The Italians do drive well, but they don't care much about lanes. San Miniato was suitably small and Medieval but so small as to have no restaurants despite a quota of tourists. We finally were reduced to gobbling a pizza beside the busiest country road we have ever seen---But here is what we found--

View from a Tuscan hill top town.

 

View of the piazza del Duomo

 

And finally some sort of artists centre.




And so to Lucca.