Dec 6, 2010

Honeymoon Cruise: Port #2 Florence, Italy

Our day in Florence was definitely an adventure. We decided that we would skip the expensive Shore Excursions for this city and tour Florence on our own. Not sure if we regret it now or not. The ship docks in a town named Livorno, and to get to Florence you need to take a train for about 1.5 hours into the country. From the train station, you take a bus to the main city. If we would have known it would be so much travel, we would have planned it a little better. Don’t get me wrong, we had a blast getting lost, while barely understanding Italian signage, having random strangers directing us where to go, and being squeezed like sardines into buses with smelly people. It was actually a lot of fun! By the time we got to the city center, we only had about 2 hours to tour before we had to rush back to the bus and train station in order to catch the ship in time. We literally ran from museum to museum, from the Duomo to Ponte Vecchio. Although we didn’t get to visit any museums (the lines scrolled around the buildings!), we did stop for 5 minutes at each place to admire the history.

Here we are hanging out with David in the background...

Florence is beautiful. It’s definitely one of those places I will be visiting on my next vacation to Italia!

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4 comments:

  1. Mgar597February 14, 2012 at 9:10 AM

    I am stopping in Livorno on my Cruise in May. Would you recommend taking the tour from the ship, the one that just drops you off in Florence to explore on your own? Its $99 each but you get a full 5 hours in Florence. Did you get off the ship really early?

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    1. MelzFebruary 15, 2012 at 5:59 PM

      Hi there! Yes, I do recommend you take the tour. Looking back, I regret not taking a tour and doing it on my own because once we finally got there (it wasn't the easiest place to navigate) we really had no idea what those beautiful buildings were. And because it took us so long to finally get to Florence, we had no time to really go to any of the museums. For $99 I think it's worth the tour. You'll get the most out of your short time there. And yes, we left the ship reeeeally early! Hope this helps! Happy to answer any other questions!

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  2. Mgar597March 6, 2012 at 1:09 PM

    thank you so much. I am getting the tour. I found one with several of the passengers on cruisecritic.com. it goes to Pisa and Florence for $100 each. Now I have to figure out what to do in Naples. We already went to Capri and Pompeii. I want to see Sorrento and Positano. But it is on May 1st and its a national holiday so Im affraid trains might be a nightmare. We will see. Thanks for the info, love your blog.

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