After the frenzy of Venice, this is a city for reflection. The museums of Florence have a near monopoly on the artistic masterpieces of the Renaissance. The treasures here are so thick that Raphael's priceless Madonna of the Chair is casually stuck away in a little nook of the Uffizi Galleries. This is also a city for buying gifts. You'd do well to hold off on your European shopping until you've seen the leather goods stalls in the Florence straw market or the jewelry shops on the Ponte Vecchio. Items which sell for $10 on New York's Fifth Avenue are priced here at a couple of bucks.
HOTELS: For, Florence has some of the least costly hotel "finds" in Europe-so many of them, in fact, that it really isn't necessary to move as high as the Second Class category-although there are some pretty superb choices in that classification, too. You ought to know, preliminarily, that some of our selections are pensions-the tiny European hotels that offer meals along with their rooms (some, however, do not require that you take the meals). In Italy, the normal pension ("pensione") consists of a single floor of an apartment house or office building, almost always upstairs; and you must reserve judgment until you've actually ascended in the elevator and inspected the accommodations. Particularly in Florence-which is an ancient city, historic, and with virtually no modern buildings-the inside appearance of most pensions is far better than their shabby 18th-century exteriors would indicate. Some of them offer amazingly large rooms, with balconies, parlors, all sorts of added features.
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