Florence the twelfth

It was map-in-hand day today, making me one of the footpath-clogging jerks I despise, but I was on the lookout for hidden gems and things I wanted to see again.

Palazzo Vecchio. It's Florence's town hall. It differs from Auckland's town hall in that Marilyn Manson has never performed there.

Neptune, mightiest of fountains, outside the Palazzo Vecchio in Piazza della Signoria.

Then, turn around, and I'm apparently back in the eighties, when expos were all the rage. I was particularly on the lookout for a fibreglass kiwifruit train, but alas.

Apparently it's just the Festival of Europe. You must obey the flags! Yay Europe. Boo everywhere else. It's an exciting time where they do thrilling things like block off most of Piazza della Signoria and put up a big screen showing replays of European Council meetings.

This couple was having some kind of passive-agressive argument (as are at least half of the vacationing couples who have crossed my path thus far). I was all "Dude, you're in God's front yard." This is Orsanmichele, or as I like to call it, Awesomemichele.

All the way around Awesomemichele are niches filled with saints that represent the different Florentine guilds that commissioned them. This one is the guild of apothecaries, which seems a poor choice - shouldn't drugs not be within reach of small children? 

There's actually an artwork in here, a big pre-Renaissance altarpiece or something. You can see the halos at the top. Heh, Mary is built like a house.

Piazza della Repubblica. I was reading that they built this when Florence became the capital, and planned to follow it with many more instances of busting stuff down and making Florence a city of wide boulevards and triumphal arches (like Paris, I suppose), but the busybody English expats busied their bodies usefully and ran a successful campaign to drop that nonsense. Then the capital moved to Rome. So the moral of the story is "well, crap".

Hey, a cinema! I should go and see Thor, because honestly, my enjoyment of that movie is not going to be based on being able to understand it.