26th Sept - 1st Oct - Florence, Italy Part 2

After Rome, both Bel and I kind of suffered from ‘gallery / museum exhaustion’ (not sure if this is an actual verb). For a change, we thought of either going for a bicycle tour in Tuscany or a bus tour to Pisa and wine tasting in Tuscany. After some discussion, we finally decided to sign up for the Tuscany Bike Tour. Since the bike tour costs €60 per pax and we’re on a budget, we decided to forego the galleries and museums in Florence and each would cost around €10. We were telling ourselves, Gallery Accademia is only to see ‘David’, Uffizi is just for the paintings; we can do without them.

While walking on the streets, I saw a tourist information office so we went in to get some information. We found out that there are several free concerts every night in churches around Florence. While Bel was asking the tourist information counter officer for a list of free concerts that night, I saw a notice on the counter top… it mentioned that on the 27th and 28th September Italy will celebrate the European Heritage day so all the state museums and art galleries open their doors to the public, with free entrance this weekend. I wasn’t quite sure if I understood it correctly so I asked Bel to read it.

Me: Eh Bel, look at this, am I understanding this correctly? The galleries are free tomorrow and Sunday?
Bel: Hmm… what? Let me read ah………
Ehh… yeah wor… looks like it. Wait let me double confirm with her (the officer)
Excuse me, does this notice means that we can enter the galleries / museums for free?
Officer: Oh yes, you can enter for free but you still have to queue up and since it’s free so I think it’ll be quite a long queue.
Bel: Oh great, but which are the galleries and museums include? Do you have a list?
Officer: Sure, here is the list for all the galleries and museums in Florence and those with the ‘*’ markings belonged to state.

We both quickly checked through the lists and were thrilled to find that Accademia, Uffizi and the Palazzo Pitti had ‘*’ on them. Both of us came out of the office with big smiles patched to our faces. Hehe, well its our lucky day after all and it showed that its important to visit tourist info office. Who knows, you might strike ‘gold’ like us.

That evening, we attended a piano concerto at the San Lorenzo church. Here, we saved a couple of euros as you need to pay admission fee when you visit during the day. But as a venue for the free concert, we can enter the church for free. Of course, you can’t really walk around the church freely to admire the church interior, but its more than enough for us.