Another big highlight of the visit to Florence were trips to the Uffizi and Academia Galleries, which house some of the most important works of late Medieval and Renaissance art. The Uffizi is full of works by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Mantegna, Correggio, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and Caravaggio. It was truly breathtaking.

The Academia, of course, houses Michelangelo’s David and while we were there they had a special exhibit of the paintings of Lorenzo Monaco, a Gothic artist as well as some of his manuscript illuminations. These are my favorite periods of art, so I was like a kid in a candy store.

Another place of arty goodness that we visited was the Convent of Saint Mark, which has, I would estimate, at least two dozen beautiful frescoes by Fra Angelico. The convent was under the patronage of Cosimo the Elder de’ Medici and played host to the religious firebrand Girolamo Savonarola. They still have some of Savonarola’s personal effects in the cells where he stayed.

More images from Florence:

This last image is of Basilica di Santa Croce di Firenze, the principal Franciscan church in Florence which contains the funerary monuments fo Galileo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli.