Days 11–13: Florence Delivers, Unhurriedly

Three nights in the cradle of the Renaissance. A detour to Pisa. And the greatest steak of the journey.

A man on a bicycle cuts through Piazza San Lorenzo — five centuries of stone and a single moment of ordinary life.

Milan talks loudly. It announces itself in tram bells and Aperol spritzes and the audacious marble of the Duomo. It wants to be seen, and it earns that.

Florence does not announce itself. Florence waits. It lets you walk the first hour convinced you understand it — the leather stalls, the tourists, the pigeons — and then it turns a corner and shows you something that stops you completely. A Renaissance dome rising above a market crowd. Two teenagers on church steps, phones in hand, utterly unbothered by eight hundred years of architecture behind them. A woman in a beige coat walking past the most saffron-yellow wall you have ever seen, carrying a blue bag that shouldn't work as a colour combination but absolutely does.

Three nights turns out to be enough to fall for it. Not enough to understand it. I'm not sure a lifetime would be.

Left: The dome of San Lorenzo's Cappelle Medicee, framed by market canopies.

The Mercato and the Neighbourhood Around It

Sitting on the steps of a side chapel, as Florentines have done for centuries.

I arrived via the train from Milan — Trenitalia, booked in advance, a smooth 1h45 that felt over before it began — and dropped my bags near San Lorenzo. This turned out to be either a stroke of planning genius or blind luck, because the neighbourhood around the Basilica is where Florence lives its daily life rather than performing it for visitors.

The outdoor leather market that wraps around the Mercato Centrale is chaotic, cheerful, and relentlessly itself. Vendors shout, tourists browse, pigeons navigate between feet. And rising above all of it, at the end of every second alley, is the Cappelle Medicee — Brunelleschi's dome catching the afternoon light as though designed specifically to surprise you from unexpected angles. Which, in a sense, it was.

The market on a bright morning — shot into the sun at ground level. The shadow reaching toward the camera is mine. Sometimes the best way into a street scene is to become part of it.

"Florence doesn't give itself to you all at once. It parcels itself out — one golden wall, one arched doorway, one dome glimpsed over a leather stall — until, somewhere around day two, you realise you are completely under its spell."

The Food. And the Steak.

If this was the last steak I ever eat, let it be known that I die a happy man.

A word must be said here, and that word is Bistecca alla Fiorentina.

I have eaten well on this trip. Switzerland's fondue, Milan's risotto, various things described on blackboards in languages I only partially understand. Nothing — nothing — prepared me for the Fiorentine steak. A T-bone cut from Chianina cattle, cooked rare with a commitment that approaches the religious, seasoned with olive oil and Tuscan sea salt and the firm understanding that it requires nothing else. The weight of it. The char on the outside and the cool, almost purple interior. It is the kind of meal that makes you rethink the entire category of food.

Watch this space for my foodie Europe post!!

A sommelier sampling red at a packed enoteca near San Lorenzo — caught between bottles through a glass partition.

A Tuscan food shop with copper cookware and Brunello di Montalcino stacked in wooden crates. This is what a Florentine kitchen dreams of being.

The Duomo Baptistery Wall and the Bicycle

Florence's Duomo is in another category from Milan's — older, more jewel-like, the green and white marble polychrome façade of the Baptistery a patchwork of colours that photographs differently in every light condition. I spent an hour at the side wall alone, working the Gothic window with its spiral columns, watching the way the morning light came sideways across the inlaid marble and turned the whole surface into something that looked almost like a textile.

A bicycle leaned against the iron railing below the window. I waited a few minutes. Nobody came back for it. The photograph made itself.

The south side of the Florence Baptistery — 12th century polychrome marble, one bicycle, one street sign that somehow doesn't intrude. Some compositions arrive ready-made.

Street Moments: What Florence Gives the Photographer

Milan gives you geometry — shadow angles, fashion, the performative walk. Florence gives you texture. Worn stone and warm plaster. The particular ochre of a residential wall that has spent four centuries in the Tuscan sun. A street-level tabernacle with a Renaissance fresco blazing gold under a single wall lamp, three strangers gathered around it on a winter evening as though arriving at something.

San Lorenzo's flank from the piazza — a low-angle perspective that flattens centuries into a single plane of stone.

A street tabernacle off Via Nazionale at night. Three strangers, none of them related, all briefly stopped by the same thing. Florence is full of these accidental congregations.

This is the photograph that makes Florence. A yellow wall, a wooden door, iron bars, a small arched niche — and then someone walks through it carrying a blue bag and the whole thing becomes alive. Waited about twenty minutes for the right person.

Stay tuned. Day trip-tip to Pisa and a wrap up of what to expect in Florence..