The Uffizi, home to Renaissance Italian painting, was the highlight for me. I don't have anything to add beyond the centuries of commentary about the place already. The crowds are a little tough, but we did put in a solid 4 hours lingering as much as possible with all the biggies, including the Venus on the Half Shell.
After those few days comes the real point of a trip like ours -- digging in deeper and seeing the stuff the guidebooks note in small print or not at all. We knew we had 18 days between Rome and our next flight, and we seriously debated hopping around to different cities every three days to cover as much as possible. Not doing that means not seeing Venice, for example, but it's the right choice for our style.
Mostly we've become dogged fresco hunters, tromping to any church with remnants that connect the dots in Renaissance art history from the Baroque period to Mastaccio to Filippo Lippi to Boticelli to Ghirlandaio.
Some of the places we've been in the last few days have been relatively well-trodden sites like Santa Maria Novella, San Marco and San Lorenzo. Some are well known but don't get that much traffic because they're a little outside the central area, such as Santo Spirito, Santa Trinita and Santa Maria del Carmine, where this morning we got to see Mastaccio's Expulsion fresco.
And some are left all to us, like Cenacolo di Sant'Apollonia, overlooked not just by contemporary tourists but by most of history. In the chapel of a convent that kept the gates locked pretty tight is a Last Supper fresco that no one outside knew about for hundreds of years until about 1880, along with the remnants of other long-lost frescoes that have been covered up.
A long trip also means not jamming every day full. On Sunday we lingered at breakfast until our favorite panini stand opened, packed a picnic, tramped across the river, outside the city walls and up to the rose gardens overlooking the city.
