Candida Martinelli's Italophile Site
Main
Page This family-friendly site celebrates Italian culture for the enjoyment of children and
adults. Site-Overview
Florence's cathedral from space courtesy of GoogleEarth Escapio.com
offers a wide selection of boutique hotels in Italy. You
can search the selection by price, popularity, region, city, and even by
hotel type (i.e. boutique, historic, gourmet, family, design, luxury,
romantic, spa, nature and many, many more) and features (i.e. internet,
city, sea, pool, spa and many more). There is even an option to
check for those hotels offering the best discounted prices. I link
here to their Tuscany Hotels.
Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens from space courtesy of
GoogleEarth
Visit my Florentia
Page to access some images and for information about the Florentia
line of paper products.
The above image is of a poster available from a
site called "Views of Florence". They have lots of
posters of old Florence for sale on-line. I've not ordered from
them, but the images on the site are very beautiful.
The Prince of Florence is a unique game that brings you back to
Renaissance Italy.
Florentine
Artists Mini-Biographies
It's said that most tourists to
Italy visit only three cities: Rome, Venice and Florence.
For those tourists: But Florence is more
than a time-capsule. It is a stylish, artful, cultured, and
vibrant city. Florentines are known throughout Italy for their business sense and
economic prowess. This reputation is well-earned. The city
is alive with small and medium-sized businesses, and surrounded by
larger industries that sell to both national and international
markets. (Including Mokaflor, the Espresso of Florence!) FlorenceFashion.com
is a site visitor that offers luxury services in Florence. Their
blurb goes like this: "Luxury in Florence: Top boutiques, outlets,
shops, hotels, restaurants, tourist
If you've never been to Florence, or want to relive a visit there,
click here for a
virtual tour with lots of photos. As for read tours, the British newspaper The Telegraph offers some help, with how
to spend your summer in Florence. Click here
to read all about it. Donnini and Rivoire are two of the top pastry-cafes in Florence,
places to not miss when touring. Try this
online guide to Florence from Fodor's for more interesting sights. This
is a wonderful clickable map
that breaks
Florence into 9 zones and shows you each zone's key attractions.
This is a good way to plan your wanderings beforehand.
The Terra di
Toscana site offers great information on Florence. It is
virtually an on-line guidebook with pages for all the major
religious buildings, museums, and historical buildings. Here is a
sample of their information on Florence's streets and squares:
Piazza
della Signoria Yahoo
also offers a list with Florentine information. And the official Florence
Tourist Office offers lots of
information
too. To read about Florence's famous historical football match that's held
each year, and to see some action photos of the event, go to my Calcio
page. The Galleria degli Uffizi is the main museum of Florence,
and one of the major museums in Italy, and the world. They have a
wonderful website that lets you get a map of the gallery, and the
contents of each room. There is also
another website with loads of
information, too. If you only have a short amount of time in
Florence, it's a good idea to know what you want to see and where to
find it in the vast museum before you get there.
All the
major
artistic monuments in Florence are represented on this map. Each image
is linked to a guide book page explaining why you might want to visit
that site. It is very well done, with photos and history.
"Maggio Musicale" is the Florentine music
festival that features world-class performers and conductors. Visit their site for information
about performances and tickets. I went every year I lived in Florence
and attended the symphonic and opera seasons, so I can recommend it
highly. The tickets were reasonably priced, the performances
excellent, and the theatre was beautiful, as all theatres seem to be in
Italy. The Florentine school of art overflows with artists and their
masterpieces. To help prepare for a visit to Florence's churches
and museums, visit my pages with short, illustrated biographies of these
artists.
Florence was the home to two very famous English poets of the
1800s: Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Click here to
visit a page I've put together about them and their love of Italy and
Florence in particular.
I lived in Florence for nearly five years so I have lots of stories
of life there, too many to tell in this space. But more than
stories, I have vivid memories of images and events that will no doubt
remain with me longer than the stories. I will use the stories and
memories, someday in the distant future, to drive batty my fellow
inmates of a retirement home. For you, I'll just make a brief list
of some of the more vivid remembrances: The white marble statues floating over the snow-dusted main square
on Christmas Eve, all glowing with an other-worldly air in the soft
evening lights Sun-bathing in a park with Italians, above the Florentine skyline,
overhearing a twenty-something American tourist supposing he'd
wandered upon a university, the only place he'd ever seen people
sunbathing on grass before Catching a rose tossed by a brawny, dusty and tattered
costume-wearing competitor after the yearly Calcio Storico match, to
my then boyfriend's chagrin Having to climb from my neighbor's window to my window, three
stories up, after accidentally breaking off their key in their front
door's lock, and in mid-climb, finding myself the lunch-time
entertainment for a dozen roofers relaxing on a building only meters
away Taking two young children for their first visit of one of the most
beautiful churches in Florence, which they preferred to the park
with the swans and begged to return to, to the surprise of their
parents On a day I was looking particularly well put together, it seems,
the motherly clerk at a bakery telling everyone present that if she
were my mother, she would have proudly signed her handiwork for all
to see The beautifully wrapped packages the staff of Cafe Rivoire made
for me every time I purchased two pastries for breakfast on Saturday
mornings, sleepy-eyed and hastily dressed, because I lived across
the street The five-year-old son of a man to whom I taught English, who
practiced his budding pick-up techniques on me each time I gave his
father an English lesson, much to his father's embarrassment (they
start young in Italy!) The time a family who'd invited me to Sunday lunch announced at
the table that they were celebrating their daughter's first
menstruation that had started just that morning, and then they
waited for me to make my congratulations before serving the pasta;
"Today, she's become a woman!" they announced.
(Different customs in different cultures.) If you'd like to read more about Florence before your trip, or
checkout the printed guidebooks, you can use this Search tool to see
what's available from Amazon.com, what people say about the books, and
what they cost.
Just enter 'Books' in the 'Search' field, and 'Florence Italy' (for
example, or you could put 'Gli Uffizi' or 'Florence Italy
camping'...). Then click on the 'Go' button to see the resulting
list.
Here are some
selections I've made of books, DVDs, Games that I think you might like.
Florence,
Virtual Tour, Monuments, Calcio Storico, Prints, Maggio Musicale...
Introduction
Virtual Tours and Real Tours
services and more to turn your Florence stay into an unforgettable
experience!" If you have an older version of Flash Player, you may
need to click
twice on their internal links, but the trade off is a stylish site. 
Ponte
Vecchio
Bellosguardo
Fontana
del Porcellino
Loggia
dei Lanzi
Ponte
di Santa Trinita
Via
San Leonardo
Calcio Storico
La Galleria degli Uffizi...
Florentine Artist
Mini-Biographies
Famous Florentine
Italophiles
Personal Recollections
Books
About Florence
