Florence - with some machines

It's a sad fact that, after visiting Venice, any other city can appear somewhat humdrum at first. As soon as we came out of Florence's station we were confronted with roads! And traffic! And no canals to be seen!

Many of Florence's streets approach Venetian levels of narrowness and yet still allow all manner of vehicular access. Any pavements that do appear when you get out of the very centre are often precisely wide enough for one and a half persons to walk abreast, ie of little use for soppily hand-holding couples.

The various vans, taxis and buses (including electric ones, excitingly) at least have the decency to take things slowly around the city streets. But the bikes... oh the bikes! Some cyclists will attempt to weave around the hordes of pedestrians with whom they are unwisely allowed to share the ways, whilst their more resolute bretheren keep to an arrow-straight course and rely on their bell to get tourists to move out of the way, with varying degrees of success.

And my God... the tourists. Anywhere near the Uffizi, Duomo or Palazzo Vecchio there were tour parties as far as the eye could see. A lot of whom appeared to be schoolkids, even the ones who were no longer in their teens and enjoying a gap year or mid-term break or suchlike - me having reached after 33 years the official point where anyone younger than me becomes part of an amorphous, age-indeterminate mass.

Factor in several rain showers and at least one thunderstorm, and you may have come to the conclusion that I didn't care much for Florence. In fact that opposite is true - but moaning is so much more interesting, don't you find?

Firstly, the local policemen wear very amusing hats. Secondly, it's a compact old place, making a two-day stay more than sufficient to fully embrace its dinkiness.  Going up the Duomo (the massive-domed cathedral) first would be recommended, as you get a beautiful panorama of the town's continuous wash of sandstone and red-slated rooftops and the surrounding hills at the top of the 400-odd stairs, plus an close eyeful of the dome's fresco interior (some kind of grand ascent/descent of man allegory, I assumed) at halfway up/down. The rest of the cathedral's interior is somewhat bland, its constructors obviously relying on the obscenely bulbous dome and the ornate exterior to generate sufficient awe - a job which they perform admirably.

The Piazza della Signoria is where people tend to congregate and admire the extensive collection of statues. The Palazzo Vecchio was the home of the ruling Medici family and is still the seat of local government today, and is a pleasant enough museum visit (it's also the place from which Hannibal Lecter hung a dead policeman's body). Nextdoor is the Uffizi Gallery, one of those places where you get the impression they'd rather not have to bother with the inconvenience of having paying guests come traipsing through their corridors. One bit of free advice: for the love of God, either pre-book and pay the surcharge or get there extremely early to avoid a two-hour wait stuck behind a load of chain-smoking Italian teen-kid-olescent types.

Once inside it was pretty good though, as far as our limited art-appreciating faculties could allow anyway. The building is a work of art in itself, with some of the galleries playing host to seriously expensive wares for centuries. The highlight is Boticelli's Birth of Venus - known to connoisseurs as a Renaissance masterpiece and to everyone else as that one with the naked ginger chick that looks a bit like Charlie Dimmock, or something. (Remember back when she was one of the most desirable females in Britain? The past really is a foreign country isn't it?)

I'm getting into the dangerous habit of referring to all galleries purely by the name of their most famous displayed works - the Louvre is the Mona Lisa Building, the Chicago Art Institute is American Gothic Land, and the Accademia in Florence is The David Place. Fortunately, the latter is pretty much how it sells itself, barely even pretending that anybody would be interested in any of its fairly generic old religious paintings (one thing we've taken away from Florence - once you've seen one Madonna and Child, you've pretty much seen them all).

And it doesn't need to worry about anything else, as The David (Michaelangelo's one, for the really slow) is so stupidly magnificent - an enormous, genuinely awe-inspiring sight. I must confess I didn't know its subject was the Biblical fella of "and Goliath" fame, nor that he's holding the legendary slingshot. Let's be honest though, Goliath must rate as one of history's greatest bottlers - coming into a massively hyped fixture as overwhelming favourite, he failed to come away with a win, or even his continued existence. He had to be disappointed with that.

Actually there was one further item of interest in the Accademia: at the end of a display board on the evolution of ladies' hairstyles in 19th century France (really) appeared the following sentence, possibly rendered unintentionally more scathing in translation: "Useless ornament seems to have become an essential part of femininity."

Erm... discuss.

The morning of Uffizi queuing turned out well in the end, as the early rain had totally cleared up by the time we left, giving us a sunny afternoon to sample the beautiful Boboli Gardens of the Palazzo Pitti. This also entailed a stroll over the Ponte Vecchio, which was the only one of Florence's old bridges not destroyed by the Germans, allegedly on Hitler's orders. Nobody knows why, although perhaps the fact that all the town's Jews were forced to set up their jewellery shops here because they weren't welcome anywhere else appealed to the Fuhrer's cheeky sense of humour.

Florence came across as similar to Venice in my mind - not a big floaty museum obviously, but hermetically sealed from the wider world in its own snowglobe-like way. And with some top-notch food too. Go there now and try the Spezzatino di Cinghiale, aka wild boar stew - you know it makes sense.