Started the morning with a walk across the Ponte Vecchio bridge to the Oltrarno (south of the Arno). What a beautiful morning with the sun shining and the river sparkling.
Looking up river heading toward the bridge.
The bridge is lined with jewelry shops. The Rolex store was closed so Trey didn’t get to window shop.
We stopped for breakfast at Ditta Artigianale in the Oltrarno area. Iced lattes for both of us. The coffee is so good here. Avocado toast with a poached egg for me and pancakes and bacon for Trey. We took a picture of the water. We’ve become accustomed to bottles of water with every meal, and a nice person to serve you and ask if you would like “still or frizzante”. We usually ask for one of each. Still for Trey and frizzante (sparkling) for me.
Next stop, Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens. The Palace was lovely and most importantly, it was nicely air conditioned! We are guessing the air is to protect the carpeting and the tapestries. It’s the first museum we visited that the air was very effective. We took our time!
The chandeliers were one of my favorite parts of this museum. I took a few pictures.
The gardens were beautiful! They ran pretty steeply uphill in some places. We decided we are glad to be doing this trip now rather than ten years from now!
We worked up an appetite in the gardens. Gustapizza was our scheduled lunch stop. It was quite busy so we knew it would be good. My six months of restaurant research (read as obsessively looking at restaurants) also gave us good indication it would be fantastic. We ordered our pizza and two bottles of water for 10 Euros (that’s less than $11) then proceeded to wait about 20 minutes for our pizza. It was worth the wait and we really should have ordered two!! We walked to Piazza Santo Spirito and ate the pizza sitting on a bench watching the pigeons.
For short video of the pigeons and Piazza Santo Spirito see below.
Pigeons in Piazza Santo Spirito, Florence.
Posted by Traveling TwoGether on Monday, July 1, 2019
On the way back to the cottage we stopped at Gelato Carraia. It was the best gelato of the trip so far! We each had three flavors. Lemon, cream and bacio (chocolate hazelnut…tasted like Nutella!) for me and strawberry, lemon and Nutella yogurt for Trey. It was so good.
We relaxed for a bit and sat in the garden drinking some Fragolino that we picked up at the grocery store down the street. Fragolino is a sparkling wine made from grapes that taste like strawberries. Sweet wine is not my favorite but I had heard about it and wanted to try. Trey agreed it was fine but not something we would seek out again.
We took a taxi to dinner at Antica Trattoria da Tito. Tonight was our last chance to try the Florentine T-bone steak. It’s famous here and is only cooked rare. We have eyed it every night and this was our last chance. We started with pasta. We have had a pasta course with every dinner in Italy and will continue on this path. It’s that good. I had linguine allo scoglio which is linguine with seafood. It had pieces of octopus, clams and mussels. Trey had maccherone ragu with funghi (looked like what we call rigatoni) with meat and mushroom sauce. Yum!
Then came the steak. It was indeed rare. It was flavorful but not as tender as we had hoped. Lots of tendon. We would probably not get it again. Or maybe once more for a second chance! We didn’t have much of a problem finishing it!
The steak came with a house made spice mix. It was full of flavor with multiple herbs and salt. We had white beans, roasted potatoes, and spinach for sides. Simple and good.
We finished with a shared tiramisu and Cantucci with Vinsanto. We are really going to miss tiramisu and Cantucci with Vinsanto.
