Welcome to our trip to Florence, Italy. From March 21 through April 4, 2002 we travelled to Italy to soak in Italian art, architecture, music, scenery -- Italy in general, and Florence in particular. As we went, we all took lots of pictures and Marsha and Jane kept journals. Although I was planning on posting the pictures and our commentary as we went, I ran into trouble accessing the Internet due my faulty packing (didn't bring the right cards to plug into my laptop, sigh...). But, now that we are back, I will be posting a new page for each day, including pictures and comments about what we did. I did this last year with a trip to California and got a lot of positive responses.

We not only visited Florence, but also Ben who is studying this semester in Florence. And "we" is not just the four Baker-Forsdick's -- we added my sister Jane Hall to keep us in line -- and that she did with her wonderful, lighthearted disposition. We traveled with Jane before in 1997 to Taos, Mesa Verde, Bryce, Zion and Grand Canyon (picture at top of screen) so we knew that she was going to be a great traveling companion.

In Florence, we rented an apartment on Via Degli Strozzi in the center of the city. Marsha found it on the web. We are planning on visiting Venice for 2 days just before Easter and have talked about renting a car one or two days to drive outside of Florence -- possibly visiting friends of friends.

Center of Florence

click to see larger view

One thing that people seemed to enjoy last year and which we enjoyed from various Internet Cafes while on the road, was the "Discuss" link at the end of the title line above. If you click on it you will be taken to a web site where there was a discussion of our trip. Feel free to add to this discussion if you are so moved. We are always interested in new ideas of places to see or comments about our trip.

Finally, I love lists and multiples of the same type of thing. I have collected such multiples onto the following separate pages:

We hope you enjoy these pages.

Regards,

Harry, Marsha, Will, Ben, and Jane