Florence

Today begins three days of somewhat risky decision-making on my part. If you have ever cruised, you know that the cruise lines always strongly encourage you to book shore excursions through the cruise. This is because if you do that, there is no chance that the ship will leave without you should you be unexpectedly delayed for any reason. Booking with any outside vendor exposes you to the possibility that if you don’t reach the ship by the boarding time posted, it will leave without you, making it necessary for you to find your own way to the next port to recapture your vacation. For that reason, I have always booked our excursions through the cruise line.

Once I looked through the possible ship bookings for Italy, however, I didn’t think any of them were exactly what I wanted. The tours to Florence, Rome and Naples started on tour buses with up to 60 people, and our experience has been that when you have so many people, the tour is hostage to the slowest person on that tour. Added to the fact that tour buses can leave a lot to be desired, I decided to look outside the cruise line.

After much research, I found Rome Private Excursions (RPE). This company was established in 2004 by Luca Orlandi and is billed as a luxury tour option for the main tourist cities in Italy. Bob and I could book all three cities in Italy: Florence, Rome and Naples exclusively for us, with a driver and separate tour guides if we wanted. I texted Luca and described what we hoped to cover each of the three days, and he assured me that we would be in complete control of the itinerary and that RPE would absolutely get us back to the ship each day without fail. I researched pages worth of customer reviews and found that the company was overwhelmingly considered 5/5. So, we booked a tour guide for each of the next three Italy days through RPE. The pricing was very similar to the pricing offered by Princess, so it seemed like a no-brainer. After our Barcelona disaster, we were wary of our luck, but it would be an adventure either way.

Communication leading up to the cruise was great, and for places where we needed front of the line tickets, Luca booked those well in advance of the cruise.

And so, on Friday, August 14, we began the first of our three Italy days. Emiliano was our first driver. The instructions seemed clear: we would exit the cruise ship at the Port of La Spezia, board a shuttle at the cruise terminal, get off at the first stop, and Emiliano would be waiting for us. And everything worked as described. Emiliano welcomed us into the Mercedes town car, and we began the 90 minutes drive to Florence. We had specifically wanted to go to the Academy Gallery to see the David sculpture by Michelangelo, and we had front of the line tickets to get into the museum. This was one of the main reasons I had been looking for options apart from the cruise line. The offering from Princess was that we would see the David replica statue from the outside of the museum, as there wouldn’t be time to have 60+ people actually go into the museum.

The statue of David is truly awesome. And if David was sculpted to scale, I can’t imagine how big Goliath must have been. David is 17 feet tall by himself, and with the pedestal, he measures 24.6 feet. The statue weighs 1200 pounds. He was carved from a single block of white Carrara marble, extracted from quarries in Tuscany, which Emiliano pointed out to us as we drove. Michelangelo was not the first sculptor commissioned to bring David to life. Three other artists had tried and failed to do so, pronouncing the marble unworkable. But Michelangelo was able to see the vision in that marble, and 26 years after the idea was first considered, David began to emerge from the marble. It took Michelangelo three years to complete this masterpiece. David carries rocks in his right hand and has a slingshot on his left shoulder, so his statue shows him prior to felling Goliath. And the pupils of his eyes are heart shaped, not circular, and much debate has occurred over the ages as to why Michelangelo chose to depict them so. And there was a great objection by Leonardo da Vinci, who was an enemy of Michelangelo, over whether David should sport a fig leaf to cover his privates. One was added for many years, but David currently is nude in all his glory.

After seeing David, we wandered through the museum. Numerous paintings and statues depict many stories from the Bible, and while the museum is not large, it is easy to get lost as you walk through the many rooms. We spent the better part of an hour there, and then met up with Emiliano, who drove us around Florence, pointing out additional points of interest. The Basilica of Santa Croce was also a stopping place, and the stained glass, and sweeping architecture that raises the eye to the heavens was truly beautiful. It is the world’s largest Franciscan church, and contains tombs and monuments to Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Dante Alighieri. One unexpected plaque was dedicated to Florence Nightingale!

By now we were hungry and we asked Emiliano, who lives in Florence, to recommend a restaurant that he loved. He took us to Ristorante Boccadama where we had the hands down best lasagna of our lives. It was so creamy it melted in our mouths. They say it is made with yogurt, but I suspect a touch of the gods. And it turns out that this is also Stanley Tucci’s favorite restaurant in Florence.

Emiliano left us to shop for an hour in Florence, which is like any other major city in the world and has numerous high end fashion shops. After wandering in the heat we were ready to return to the ship in plenty of time for the all-aboard call. Did I mention the heat? It was 104 degrees in Florence, and very humid. We were happy to climb back in the air-conditioned car for the long drive back. Emiliano was a great driver, offered loads of information, took us to the perfect restaurant, and made the decision to book a private tour a great one.

To cap off the perfect day, the dessert in the ship restaurant was Baked Alaska—Bob’s favorite, so we indulged and then took our stuffed and weary bodies to bed.