Today we headed across the Arno River to the Santa Croce Church. This is a 14th Century Franciscan church, built by Arnolfo di Cambio, who designed the Duomo after finished the Santa Croce church. It has the same white marble as the Doumo, although it is just a facade, with the rest being brown bricks. The church holds the tombs for just about every important Florentine you can think of - Machiavelli, Michaelangelo, Rossini, Galileo, plus a memorial to Dante... Some of them are stately tombs, but others are quite gaudy. Galileo lived his last years under house arrest in Florence because he said that the earth revolved around the sun - that was enough to cause the church to blow a fuse, and his remains were only allowed in the church years after his death.

There are frescoes by Giotti everywhere . There are some in a smaller chapel showing the Death of St Francis, where his brothers are looking distinctly distraught bidding him farewell on his deathbed. Apparently this fresco was one of the first to show an expression of human emotion, which seems quite bizarre when you think of Italians and their over enthusiasm for life! Many of the frescoes were chiselled off the walls of the church over the years, with new works replacing them. The St Francis fresco only survived because someone whitewashed over it, and it was found years later during renovations.

The Church was flooded badly in the huge Florence flood in 1966, and many of its artworks and furnishings were damaged. 15 feet of water swept into the church, rising halfway up the central doorway. There are flood markers at most of the Florence sites, and it's hard to believe how high some of them are. 14000 people were left homeless across Florence, and tens of thousands of paintings, sculptures, frescoes, books etc were swept away from museums across the city. There is a Crucifix by Cimabue in the Santa Croce Church that was badly damaged by this huge flood, and it became quite a symbol of the flood's destruction. The whole world provided money and people to restore the damage, with volunteers referred to as 'mud angels' as they had so much mud to contend with.

Attached to the Church is a museum and the monk's refectory. The refectory houses a 1300 square foot Tree of the Cross and Last Supper, which shows Jesus on the Cross, with branches sprouting out of the cross. Not the most easy on the eye painting, and I wonder how many of the monks felt uneasy having their meals under it !

Attached to the Church is a leather school that was started after WWII to give war orphans a trade. The quality of the work is exquisite, and though the prices of goods are high, they are apparently much cheaper than you will find at the high end fashion shops in the town. I found quite a few handbags I liked, but decided that I couldn't give up my backpack quite yet (imagine me being that neat and tidy!).

In the afternoon we had our first gelato, chocolate and pistachio, which was quite a treat. I now understand why everyone makes a big song and dance about gelato in Florence. The queues outside of some small shops are sometimes as long as the queues to go into key museums!