The David & other things
And so to Firenze. I stayed at a hostel that had one of the most interesting breakfasts included in the price - you could choose from cereal or eggs cooked a variety of ways (first time I've ever had a cooked-to-order free breakfast), plus there was a very random buffet: fruit, cake, chips, mini sandwiches, and what looked like leftover pasta & pizza & risotto (not sure where it was leftover from, as they didn't serve other meals), plus some grey gloopy stuff that could have been just about anything. I stuck to eggs and fruit (and yes, a little cake) and it was good!
I went on a free walking tour from the hostel, which basically went around all the churches & palaces & piazzas and gave us quite a detailed history of Florence - all very good except that it was freezing and standing still in a shady piazza learning about the Medicis & Michelangelo etc etc became a little tedious.
After warming up at the hostel for a few minutes & adding some layers to my attire, I headed to the Galleria dell'Accademia for some fine art time - really to see The David. Other than a few statues, the museum was pretty much made up of pieces where the captions said "this used to be the altar-piece of this church…"
The David was suitably impressive, and the absolute star of the museum (the building was in fact purpose-built for the statue, and it has a great position under a little dome with all corridors leading to it). As always it's amazing that someone can make something so smooth & perfect out of a block of marble (& of course they say that this was a block of marble that multiple other people had declared unusable).
The other very interesting thing in the museum was a collection of unfinished Michelangelo statues (he had a habit of leaving things unfinished). They were quite fascinating because you could sort of see how the process works - parts of them were still the original block, other bits were beginning to be roughly shaped, and others were at a smooth stage - really interesting.
