Saturday Oct 10 Uffizi Galeries

This morning I left as early as convenient and got to the end of the queue for the Uffizi Gallery at 8.30. Many people were ahead of me but the line was steadily moving.  Again, I had to leave my passport to get an audioguide, went thru scanners ( though not as sensitive as the airline ones now), encouraged to download the map of the gallery. I found a nice looking official man and asked if there was anywhere I could get a real map. He was not young and understood. Er, he said, not really . Just a minute. He went behind a desk and gave me a paper map. Excellent,, thank you. Some of the people in tour groups I noticed had them.. The gallery is huge, there were many many many people. I though there is no way I am going to be handle this for long. There were about 50 rooms with ranging from 2 or 3 paintings to about 15 paintings / sculpure/ whatever in each. I walked thru the first 5 or 10 galleries without looking at the paintings, thinking they were not the period I wanted to see and I could go back. Turns out you can only go 1 way. Ah well, too bad,. Then I wanted to look at some, but you ahd to wait your turn while people manoeuvred around you ,. All the time surrounded by people,,quite closely. There was a long queue of people waiting to get into a particular group of 5 rooms. My map had on it what they were, and, luckily, not the ones I was interested in, so I bypassed that queue and it became more pleasant. Or rather  less unpleasant. I was pleased to see the ones I was looking for and some other paintings from artists whose work I have seen before. As  usual , you get out through the gift shop. There were a few things that caught my eye but I was too tired. So left , about 2 1/4 hours after I arrived.

I found a pleasant place in a side street for a coffee and worked out what to do for the rest of the day. - walk to the local markets, buy more fruit  and more cheese, bring it back , then  go to the place I have been to before that has nice food a bit cheaper than other places.  Luckily when I dropped the shopping off I met Chiara, the daughter of the house sweeping the foyer. I asked her about my anti - mosquito gadget that did not appear to be working last night. It is a small bottle filled with some liquid that you plug into a power point.  Lots of the little blighters kept me awake. Turns out I had taken it out the previous night to look at it and put it back upside down .  No wonder it didnot work. I am hoping for a good night's sleep tonight!