Florence Left Us Speechless! Unveiling The Ultimate Secret For Vanlifers!
good morning so last night we literally slept in the train station parking lot worked out really really well we uh bought our tickets online on the Italian Train app and we're walking 100 ft to get on our train because where are we taking them C we're going to Florence Florence yeah so let's get on the train let's go see what we can find today you guys might be thinking why are these guys on a training again well it's difficult to park the van in Florence to drive in Florence if you guys saw the last video you got an idea of what it's like in any event we're parked at a train station just outside of Florence it's only about a 20 minute ride in so we're on the train headed in and we are super excited because everything we've learned about Florence is that it's an amazing City all right so we caught the 747 train arrived in Florence a little after 8 what's next now all right we have a reservation to go see one of the most famous things in all of Italy and it's probably in a top 20 famous thing in the world we are taking you to see the statue of David that Michelangelo carved and the cool thing is we can tie this back to our video that we just finished up from the marble mines because we were up there at the Carrera marble mines and that's where Michelangelo got his marble to make this amazing statue but to go see this you book it in advance we did it with a tour guide that hopefully helps us skip some of the lines when you go see something this famous there's going to be people we got an 18-minute walk to get there let's go yes actually I think that big building is the Central Market so we can go whatever way your Google says all right we have made it to the meeting point in front of the Academia we're here a little bit early and so there's that moment of like are we in the right place are we not but we are quite a bit early so waiting on our guy there's a few other people look like they're showing up so we'll see our tickets have showed up and we've also met our lovely guides guid's name is Antonella and snow will do better with the Anon and she speaks five languages so the Academia at one time was a university and since then it's been split to a museum half Museum half University the museum is dedicated to mangelo but our guide actually went to University here So these paintings date back to the 13th 14th 15th and 16th century leading up to the Renaissance and just an interesting fact about these things there's so much information it's a bit overwhelming but these were actually stolen by Napoleon and taken away and then they've been brought back here to this Museum and restored and what you can see Innovation the views because the painters started painting in the 14 Cent what they could see not the gold amadas no no no no this one with the team of musicians sorry no you're welcome so um all right I believe we just learned that piano Forte is the guy who invented the piano and I believe we're talking back in about the 16 1600s is when the piano invent was invented and all these instruments are back from that period looked like mostly in the 1600s and so these were very famous groups and specifically because of the guy who invented the piano I'm sorry now the main attraction is the seven masterpieces of my mangelo um including some sculptures of some prisoners that are kind of you would think he didn't finish them they're kind of partially done but apparently that was his plan like they were trying to escape from the stone like a pr prisoner would do so those are housed there and the story behind them is that uh he was sculpting them because they were commissioned by a pope now the pope passed away never paid for the work so Michelangelo just took him to his house and just had him laying around his house house several Cent centuries later some wealthy persons stumbled up on them and they ended up here where they rightfully should belong in a museum for Michelangelo but of course the Superstar is David the statue of David of this Infamous uh religious story David and Goliath it was commissioned in 1 151 it was supposed to be a statue to represent the rebirth of the City of Florence and it was going to be housed in the church and they had this vision of what it was going to look like and that Vision included him having clothes on but when Michelangelo got done clearly David is there in all of his glory and the church was kind of like no he can't go inside our church he's naked so he ended up living in the plaza outside of the church where he lived until the late 1800s when he was brought here now several years later in the early 1900s they put an exact replica of David back there in that Plaza so you can go see that as well but the real deal is what we just showed you here in this Museum and it was amazing in the 1400s Florence was booming science Arts medicine politics government all of it it was really a wealthy upand cominging city in the world a leader to the world but it had one big dark problem it had a baby problem babies were being abandoned all over the city City for many different reasons famine poverty you just illness a lot of reasons so what happened is a gild a very wealthy group of people got together and started this place that I'm sitting on the steps of right now it is called the hospital of the Innocence and what it became was the world's very first orphanage women could come here and go up to kind of a revolving door and turn their baby in when the moms did that many of them would cut a CO coin in half and make a necklace for the baby and they would keep the other half of the coin in hopes that one day be reunited but once they spun that revolving door the baby was gone and the mom could not get them back they went down a literal small Chute where they landed in a Manger type thing at the bottom that had a statue of Mary and Joseph on each side and from there the nurses that worked here would take the babies and immediately start to take care of them and it wasn't just for the babies they raised these children uh the boys were taught to read and write uh the women were taught or the girls were taught to sew and cook and as the girls started to grow out of being able to live here you know got too old to live here they could either become wives and the orphanage would actually provide a dowery with them that went along with them if they got married or they could become nuns so they took these babies in and they raised them into adulthood so they could survive on their own almost 400,000 children came through here between the 1400s and the 1800s and still today this place works very hard on helping uh children in need here in the City of Florence and probably throughout Italy I thought it was a story that we should share with you guys it's not one of the most famous places here in Florence but I think it's a pretty special one and now we're off to sort of the Central Plaza in downtown Florence and this is where the largest one of the largest churches in all of Italy is and all of Europe really for that matter the dwomo and you can see in front of us that huge Dome and actually that wasn't completed for several for a lot a lot of years they couldn't Engineers couldn't figure out how to build that freestanding Dome as we approach this church it just keeps getting bigger and bigger but this thing is giant isn't it snow I mean the windows are as big as our B the ground Windows over there I don't know if you guys can see the scale of that but this right here leading up to it's a four story sort of apartment building and I got to tell you that's probably 10 to 12 store wow it's just huge as we told you earlier we went to the Carrera marble quaries the marble mines to see where they they they mind all this marble and obviously the importance we showed you with the statues of David and a lot of the sculptures around here what I did not know is this whole entire dwo do dwo is built of marble and you can see the white marble now there's also green stone and red stone and I'm not sure that that's marble but the white definitely is marble and this church is so incredibly huge and like none we've ever seen with the tile work the inlays the marbles the carvings I hope we can get to inside this but as we approach here I can see a line right here that wraps all the way around the church and then as we come around here guys look at this huge Tower right here and look at the ornateness of this church it's so h huge I just don't it's a terrible word to use I know such a generic word but it is enormous and the lines to get in all these places are just enormous as well wow now you can pay to get in this and you can see people all the way up on top of the Dome and this Tower here is sort of a separate building and you can pay to get in that as well I believe the admission to get in the whole Trio of buildings in this huge Plaza is $30 but you can see the lines are incredibly long the tickets are tough to get and something we just decided to not do because we thought we could just stare on the beautiful outside of this and uh that's what we're going to do but this church is absolutely amazing as much as I'd love to go inside it's just not in our cards today guys and the Duo's in a huge Plaza and as you can see it's surrounded by all sorts of little restaurants and places with little tables set out so you can have food or wine or galatos you can shop for jewelry or basically any anything you want I believe this must kind of be the shopping district we are sort of in the center of Florence right here there're just museums everywhere for what they're all on this building yeah who knows what these are tell us I think they're for torches yeah you all these motorcycles are these rentals or something think it's it's just yeah but they're all the same they all have a little bit different I mean would be like a Honda Toyota and a hey everywhere you look in this town it's some sort of Museum some sort of famous art and I think that goes back to the 1400s when this place was just thriving and booming and was like the center of the world at the time but they've done an amazing job of preserving all of this so we can walk around the streets and see it it's fascinating so one of the last places on our stop before we went to to the Grand Market which I'm really excited about was this Plaza right here and this is where as you can see they have the statue the copy of David this is where I guess originally it was but this is a literal statue garden and I think snow said there's just all sorts of museums and historical sites here almost all of them have an admission but here these are out in the courtyard and we can all just see them on display what a stunning display uh Florence is off the charts from history from art from a culture perspective it is just mindblowing we stumbled up on this Plaza not really knowing what to expect turn the corner and it is just filled literally filled with statues sculptures art old buildings and now when we tell you some of these things you need to you know our dates could be off a little bit you know we're not history Scholars these aren't carved in stone facts but it's stories we've heard while we're here or that we've read while we're doing our research but there was a big Dynasty in this area uh I know they thrived in the early 1400s and um they were very very wealthy the Michi family and uh I think they were around for centuries but they were very generous they donated a lot to the Arts they built operas they built the first theaters in this area they commissioned sculptures and and helped artists survive and thrive uh The Story Goes though that they had all this wealth and were so generous with this area of Italy that they wanted to be a little bit more powerful they wanted to have a little bit of say in the government and how the business of the city was ran but apparently they were a little bit better at the art side of things than the business side of things so the local politicians uh the Commissioners or whatever you would have called them at the time did not want their input on the business thing and there was a little bit of a power struggle and there for a while the medich dynasty some of the mediis actually got exiled out of Florence while the government was trying to kind of get things in order but I think we have that dynasty to thank for a lot of this beautiful art you see when you walk around this city they may not have been good at business but they were definitely generous with the things they gave here so right up there if you look very close you're going to see a very old sketched carving of a profile of someone's face in this wall now there's two stories there's some Legends to this but it is a pretty pretty much a fact that this was carved by Michelangelo and and that is a form of graffiti uh is still here hundreds and hundreds of years later there are two stories the first one a little more Grim than the second but apparently he watched an execution happen here in this square and this is the face of the man he saw executed and he wanted to Monument that into uh you know kind of just put it down on to him what would be his paper the other one is that he was just standing around with a buddy and you know of course Michelangelo was a famous sculptor kind of a celebrity and his buddy dared him to do it so whichever story you think it is but a little piece of graffiti from probably late 1400s early 1500s carved into the side of this building kind of a cool story you can smell the leather Italian leather right look at all these backpacks and purses pouches and jackets and belts Hi how are you wow all this walking around has us worn out but we wanted to do the Central Market we're hungry so we're going to do food before we do the market tour but it's a zoo here so it's kind of difficult to get food but we got some christinis here we got let me show you here we got bacon and artichoke we got truffle and mushroom bacon and asparagus and shrimp and a shrimp salad crust peie this is our little starter we'll go from here they might not look pretty anymore but we got them all divvied up half and half which one you starting with ctie well I think I'll start with this shrimp one right here it's got a big old shrimp on it it's got like a potato salad I'm going with a truffle that's good okay thank you thank you oh you're you're fine no thank you this is so cool you just cut it with the scissors all right we got some pizza or fukashi and this is a vegetariano with some mozzarella cheese and then we got another broccoli another sort of healthy one and uh if there is such a thing you just say Healthy Pizza all right broccoli broccoli on pizza is good oh it's got a lot of cheese it's just good get in it Kurt get in it vegetariano beautiful nice little red sauce some spinach sundried Tomatoes mozzarella delicious we're going to enjoy our dinner guys we'll see you down in the market so so yum it looks like this Market is mostly a food market haven't seen any Yuka for a while look at all the olives we have some dried uh Tomatoes sundried Tomatoes all sorts of dried beans different flowers of course a lot of cheese chees here apples peanuts walnuts chestnuts oranges very popular here some nice looking strawberries oh and look at all these delicious greens over here I don't know what this is down here on the bottom but super long R means we might come back and get some of that asparagus that looks delicious some nice Peppers some different kinds of squash some really kinds of I guess they call call it bitter melon squash I don't know Shard cabbages all kinds of good kind of vegetables here guys this is really a lot of choices passion fruits plums pears tuna which is from the cactus avocados all sorts of melons papayas lemons pomegranates kiwis sweet potatoes all sorts of potatoes beets shallots onions wow this has got everything ooh Blue Crabs here and uh some kind of sardines or anchovies lots of snails oysters at the fish market here trout or something like that a salmon up top this is a little flounder or fluke sometimes they call it halit sardines all sorts of different squid or calamari octopus shrimp whoa lots of different Seafoods truffles are very popular over here so here they've got olive oils truffle oils different kinds of pastas o the dried Meats I think you saw those and from Parma they have the Parma hams and the parmesan cheese and the different salamis all sorts of dried salted cured meats and different wines at this little stall you can actually sit down and eat right there in the little tables uh wine all sorts of different wines here look at this just keep moving through this Market uh different kinds of powdered herbs and spices looks like a lot of spicy stuff maybe some dry Tomatoes different kinds of pastas salts oils pesos pesto obviously real big here a lot of different balsamic vinegars definitely the cheese booth and you can see all the different kinds and I am not a cheese expert so I couldn't dare to tell you this but I can tell you we can smell the cheese and we can smell the Salted Meats oh and look here's the Lardo guys we had that up there in our last video foro all sorts of salted hams meats and here we have different flavored and Seasons rice and look at the fancy tricolored pastas and all the different herbs with the peppers and things like that and they also have some flowers here all right and I was just starting to think that I hadn't seen a panda or here they call it Pandy py delori all you can see all the tasty sweets here the different C sa and muffins and cookies and the fukashi and the pizzas and the different kinds of bread here multi-grain Breads and look at this stuff up top wow looks all pretty tasty even a big brownie right there all kinds of bread here biscuits they call these things biscuits up here I believe a lot of those kind of crunch you can see those well all right and here you can see the dried mushrooms they have several different kinds of mushrooms they have the garlic and the dried peppers hanging there and then they have all sorts of dried tomatoes you can buy sundried tomatoes you can buy in the packs and all sorts of Candi fruits they got pears oranges uh looks like pomelo which I thought was grapefruit maybe not they've got nectarines kiwi Ginger cherries gum quats bananas all qu sorts of different dry fruits there yes sir do you know my price today I do not know your price today but thank you I have to catch train I'll get it tomorrow if you like this video be sure to subscribe to our Channel and hit that notification Bell so you guys know when we put out new videos and don't forget you can always follow us over on Instagram to see what's going on in between videos cheers guys
2024-02-08 18:42
