Labor Day holiday: Bardini Garden & Galileo’s house

(This is part of our series of posts from our six-week Road Scholar Independent Living and Learning in Florence trip to Italy in Spring 2025. We have an index to all the posts from that trip here.)

Today, May 1, is Labor Day (or International Workers Day) in most of Europe, and it’s a national holiday in Italy. Although it would have been a perfect day to go out sightseeing, we badly needed some downtime after the packed schedule since our arrival six days ago. So we took the opportunity to sleep late–we’re both finally over the jet lag, and I got the first “normal” night of sleep in a week. Then we lounged around the house, had breakfast, caught up on emails, and figured out how to work the combo washer/dryer in our apartment (because, you know, all the instructions are in Italian, although I’m not sure they would have been much more clear in English) so we could do laundry.

Mid-afternoon, I decided to wander over to the Giardino Bardini (Bardini Garden). It hugs the steep hillside between our street and the River Arno. It turned out that the upper entrance is on the same street as our apartment, and just a five-minute walk further up the hill. We bought “Friends of the Uffizi” passes yesterday that covered my admission and also allowed me to skip the long line at the ticket window…win!

From just inside the entrance to the Bardini Garden, I could see this beautiful view of Florence below me. After taking in the view from there, I sat down in the outdoor bistro (at the bottom center of the photo) for a couple of hours to do my school homework and study. The table where I ended up sitting to do my homework is at the bottom center of the photo.

A panorama to show the entire view of Florence, looking north, from the upper terrace of the Bardini Garden.

I never get tired of seeing the two most famous and prominent Florence landmarks, the Palazzo Vecchio and Brunelleschi’s Duomo.

My “desk” for the afternoon while I worked on my language school homework.

Wide gravel paths criscross the Bardini Garden, winding down the hill toward Via dei Bardi, near where our school is. The gardens are beautifully manicured and landscaped. I didn’t explore the whole thing–I saved that for a future visit.

Looking down Costa di San Giorgio (our street) from the top of the hill, just outside the Bardini Garden. We’re getting a lot of exercise going up and down this hill!

One of those “blink and you’ll miss it” sights: this building, across the street and just a couple doors down from our apartment, was the home of Florentine astronomer Galileo Galilei in the early 1600s, when he was among the first to observe the heavens with a new invention called the “telescope”. It’s marked only by a plaque on the wall.

The plaque on Galileo’s house translates to: IN THE YEAR 1609 GALILEO GALILEI, PERFECTING THE USE OF THE TELESCOPE, CONDUCTED ASTRONOMICAL OBSERVATIONS THAT WOULD LEAD HIM TO THE DISCOVERY OF THE “MEDICEAN SATELLITES” OF JUPITER.

We just wanted a quick dinner tonight–and believe it or not, something other than pasta and pizza–so we ate at a little Indian/Pakistani/Mediterranean/Italian restaurant (they can’t seem to figure out exactly what they are). It was fast, relatively cheap, and not too bad–but right after we were seated, it filled up with a group high schoolers from France and elsewhere who were in town for a tour. But a scoop of gelato from a gelateria we hadn’t yet visited made up for the so-so meal. “OK, but first, gelato” became our unofficial motto for the trip!