I really enjoyed spending a day in the Tuscany countryside. The tour starts with a walking tour of Sienna. Our guide was very good and I did not expect to see such a spectacular church which is highly worth seeing because of the artistic marbling on the floors and walls. The walking tour is about 2 to 2.5 hour. Then to Machevilli's estate for a nice lunch..I enjoyed the historical aspect of seeing the actual chair and desk where he wrote "The Prince". Next its to Lucca for about an hour of free time..nice little town that has lots to offer. Finally about an hour at Pisa. If you are thinking of going up in the Pisa. add the skip the line and be aware that you will be climbing around 225 steps. I thought everything was done very well and the timing was good. It is a full 12 hour day.

I was very glad to buy the skip the line as the lines were quite long. The tour for the Accademia was perfect. Our guide provided just enough knowledge and context to understand what we were looking at and the tour took about an hour. Plenty of time to see the gallery. I was more disappointed in the Uffizi tour. It was later in the afternoon (prescheduled by the tour) and our guide was nice but did not fit well with what I wanted to do. In the Uffizi gallery, you have to climb 110 steps or take the elevator. Our guide unintentionally emphasized that only medical needs should use the elevator so it was subtle pressure to use the stairs; this led to one of our tourist having a medical reaction after climbing all of the stairs. The main issue though was that the guide was too detailed in describing the sociopolitic history of the times and the squabbling between families along with the development of Renaissance art. I had flashback being in my college art history course. The problem with all of this knowledge is that we spent about 10-15 minutes on each of 5 items and then the gallery was closing. There is much to see in the gallery and I would have preferred being given a general overview of how the museum was organized, a brief discussion about Renaissance art, and then a chance to see more of the fabulous art of this museum. In other words, I learned more about Renaissane art but did not get to see much.

The day that I took the tour, it was rainy so the bus guides were being very restrictive on letting people on the bus. You needed to have your ticket a head of time. So it was good to get the voucher this way. I took the 2 hour red tour and the 1 hour blue tour. I would say the narration was only average and much of the time was spent riding aound the city listening to music. It does give you a good idea of not only Florence but the immediately surroundng area. Recommend as an easy way to get to spend time in Fiesole.