We were eager to visit Florence and knew since we were on a shore excursion from a cruise ship it would be difficult to see all the sites and museums we were interested in seeing. Before we left for our vacation and the cruise we looked at the shore excursions that were available from the cruise ship and didn't see any that we were interested in.

We chose to go with the transport bus which took us into the middle of Florence. From there we had mapped out what we wanted to see and how to get there. Because we didn't know where the bus was going to drop us off when we planned out our day we didn't know what we would be seeing first. As it turned out the bus dropped us off next to Florence's largest church Santa Maria del Fiore also called del Duomo.

We visited the Accademia gallery hours church inside for a while then outside taking pictures of the unique exterior before moving on to what we thought would be our next site. We arrived at the Uffizi gallery after a few block walk to discover the museum had been sold out for the day and was already selling tickets for the next day. This would do us no good because the ship was in port for only a day. We had planned on spending a good part of our day in Florence at the Uffizi.

Since Florence was a favorite city of Michelangelo many of his great works of art were in the Uffizi and sadly we wouldn't get to see them. If we had any Idea the Uffizi could be sold out this early in the day or even at all we would have gone online to one of the big city tour companies where we could have gotten tickets in advance for the exact day we were going to be in Florence.

Now that we had at least 2 extra hours to use we could see one other museum and could spend a little more time at the other sites we had planned on seeing. One museum we wanted to see but didn't think we had time was the Museo di Storia della Scienza which was only a block from the Uffizi. This Museum is leaning more towards old scientific instruments and devices they use back then such as the astrolabe.

We spent about an hour there looking at all the devices we didn't know they had back then and went outside to enjoy the view of the Arno river. The next site we planned to see was the Ponte Vecchio bridge which is a famous landmark in Florence. In this section of Florence the sites we wanted to see were all so close we could stop and see other things on the way from one site to the other. For example we stopped and saw the bell tower of Palazzo Vecchio and bought some art from street vendors while walking to the bridge.