Traipsing round Florence, part the fourth

Suddenly, as I emerge from one museum ready to try others, it seems that everybody has flooded into Florence.  It is actually probably the busiest day of the year, at it's part of the festival of the patron saint of the city.  (Aerosmith played the previous night, my taxi driver later told me.) As a result the line to the other big museum was round the block and all those people had reservations!

Saw a few of these guys, holding machine guns.  But they just don't look as threatening as a US Cop.

Found a little Leonardo hospital that was tucked away and surprisingly empty.  I thought it was free because nobody was offering to sell a ticket or asking for one, but after I came out I saw that you were supposed to buy a ticket round the corner.  Oh well.  I couldn't quite believe I was looking at the original of some of these:

Okay, so this one is NOT an original.  They also had virtual reality headsets ("You'll go where I go - pillage what I pillage!") but people were hogging them.

One giant of the arts down, one giant of letters to follow:

ANOTHER Dante death mask?  It's like relics of Christ on Blackadder.

Looking out of the window on about the fourth floor, I saw a very Heath Robinson-esque way of storing your bike:

One of these is contemporary, the other is not:

Done with Dante.  Now out into the blazing sunshine.  (All the days I was in Florence, it was muggy and overcast in the morning but the clouds burnt off by the afternoon.)  In the daylight the 19th century marble cladding on that big church is even more glaring.

Now THAT'S art:

No way to catch the shuttle back to the hotel because streets had been blocked off for the festival.  So it was another 2-3 mile trek back to my hotel on already blistered feet, and this time in the hot sunshine.  Don't know what this building is, but worth a picture:

Lots of bikes:

Political correctness has yet to make a mark in Florence:

The library was closed.  Apparently it has a bar on the roof that's open until midnight. EXCEPT ON THE ONE DAY I'M IN FLORENCE.

A makeshift beach on the shores of the Arno:

They have the most adorable tiny vehicles for the adorable tiny streets:

Nearly back to the hotel:

Under this bridge I saw one homeless man carefully trimming another one's hair.  I thought it impolite to photograph.

You could see this view out of my hotel window.

Very Mediterranean: