Around The World Without Flying: A boat ride in Florence

This is a sea day as we head back to Southampton across the Atlantic Ocean, so as you can tell, I am catching up on my blog posts. This is with some difficulty, I might add, because we are experiencing big swells and the ship is swaying a lot. All I can say is thank goodness for my seasick tablets and some different, very effective tablets that were given to me by some lovely American friends I met on my Mediterranean cruise to the Greek islands. The only drawback of these tablets is they make you feel like you have been hit on the head, but that is still better than nausea.

I can now name that ship as the ‘Celebrity Reflection’. On that ship my cabin was at the very front, not by my choice, and I suffered quite a bout of seasickness for the first time on a very big ship. Obviously, my advice is - only ever take a cabin in the middle of a large ship, where the movement is far calmer.

Anyhow, our next port of call was Livorno in Italy, about two hours drive from Florence. I had been to Florence before, where I saw Michelangelo's magnificent ‘David’, so this time I decided to do something quite different and that was to ride on a boat along its river - the Arno river. This was no ordinary boat ride though. It was a very old-style boat used in the city once upon a time, that was pushed along using a pole (like the gondolas in Venice).

It was a beautiful smooth ride despite a temperature of 36 degrees celsius, which made us feel like we were about to expire. I don't usually perspire much, but perspiration was even trickling down my face. How the older man pushed along about twenty of us in his boat in that heat I will never know.

But the lack of any breeze along the river, which is below the level of the buildings, and the presence of only our two simple boats, resulted in such still water that we saw the most stunning reflections in the water. You will see some examples in the following photos. It was really worth baking in the heat for about 45 minutes to see that!

In addition to all the reflections, one special sight we saw along the river was the famous Ponte Vecchio (Vecchio bridge), first built in Roman times. We could see many old wooden shops along the top, partly overhanging the bridge, as well as tourists looking down. With our limited free time after the boat ride, I did not go down later to walk on it. I will tell you about what I did after the boat ride in the next post.

I will only caption some photos.

Getting into our boats.

This is Ponte Vecchio on the left.

The next bridge.

On that bridge there are two rams' heads. The one shown here looks upstream, and is supposed to have an anxious look, as there have been severe floods along the river in the past. The ram looking down from the other side looks downstream and is supposed to look relieved.