Last summer I took a month long trip to Italy. I used a car hire italy service. We managed to visit Rome, Florence, Capri, and Venice before having to go back home. Florence was my favourite stop. Even though every city had its own fabulous attractions, Florence was just so beautiful and had so many architectural and historical landmarks to see.
While in Florence, our incredibly long, and sight-seeing filled, days took place during the incredible heat of a warmer than usual July. On one such day we had planned to see the magnificent Gothic Duomo. Before we could think any better of it, we decided that the only way to properly experience the Duomo was to climb up to the top so we could look out on the city.
However, about halfway up the 463 steps it wasn’t looking like such a great idea anymore. The heat alone inside the stuffy stairwell was suffocating; but it was the tiny steep staircase that really put me over the edge. It was so narrow that even if I wanted to turn around and go back down, I couldn’t. There were so many people below me waiting for me to keep climbing that I started to feel claustrophobic inside the stairwell. I never realized how terrifying climbing up stairs could be.
When we did finally reach the top, though, the view was fabulous. It was almost worth the agony of getting there. You get the opportunity to see Florence from a bird’s eye view and you can see the whole city in a way that you wouldn’t get to if you hadn’t climbed to the top of a cathedral. I also remembered to take about a hundred pictures while I was up there because I knew I would never be climbing back up. The only thing that ruined the moment was the realization that I was going to have to climb back down the 463 stairs.
