Most likely you came to Florence, Italy because you are either an art lover or an adept in medieval history,

or you are visiting this city as a convenient stop while touring wineries and Florentine steak houses in Tuscany.

Each of those reasons alone, no doubt, would keep you busy for as long as you could afford it.

Your desire to come to Florence is not quite unique – the number of visitors each year is about forty times more than the city’s residents, although, thanks to geography, no cruise ships can anchor here.

Most tourists’ attractions are concentrated in a relatively small area of the city, and hordes of spectators are running from one recommended checkpoint to another looking at their maps and guides.

It is true that to find numerous famous monuments and sculptures that are listed in your itinerary – better to follow your maps, because the only straightforward way around, it seems, was along the Arno River (beautiful at night).

We decided to try a different way to explore this fabulous city on our first day there. We left our maps and guides behind, shut off our phones (all the maps and guides are there anyway) and went into the maze of streets to get lost, trusting our instincts and sense of direction (despite of the occasional disagreements about proper leadership).

We had a good stimulus to make that decision: the rooftop veranda in our hotel gave a full panoramic view of the old city of Florence – Brunelleschi’s Dome crowing the Florence Cathedral, the Bell Tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Basilica di Santa Croce, among others – contrasted by the green hills of the Tuscan countryside in the background.

When you set aside a map and forget for a day what you “have to” see – you are in a different world, a different Florence – a scene of street art. The first sign of those art works was just outside of our hotel – it was a real Stop sign – the first in the gallery of many different Stop sign designs.

Few steps forward – another installation – café advertisement:

Here and there – graffiti, made with a smile, not anger – and your reaction is a smile too.   

Small street café’s entrance inviting you in – “that is how we live – want to try what we eat?”

In the random buildings all around you see the distant echo of those world-known sculptures and frescoes. It made the famous ones an ordinary part of the culture and the history of the city – ordinary yes, but created by extraordinary artists.

To remind us that human history in that city exists not only in paint and stone, there was an enacting medieval procession around the Palzzo Pitti – street art once more.

History and art are everywhere around. Across the Palzzo Pitti there is a simple, unremarkable street.

Unremarkable, if not a couple of doors with the plugs above telling you that behind that one Dostoevsky lived in the late 1860s, working on “Idiot”; and another leads to the apartment of Carlo Levi – Italian-Jewish painter, writer, and anti-fascist, who is best known for his book “Christ Stopped at Eboli”.

Those are just a few glimpses from our non-mapped Florence adventure that set the foundation for our love of this city.

The next day, as compliant tourists, we started to explore the jewels of Florence’s medieval art, architecture, paintings and sculptures, monuments and basilicas – each of them deserved a lifetime of dedication.

But Florence could not stay stuck in Renaissance arts only. What we see and understand as a history of the arts today, back then was a modern and, sometimes, revolutionary avant-garde. To emphasize that point, Florence presented to us a modern art exhibition – Libero by contemporary, modern artist Ai Weiwei – which was on display, of course, in the Renaissance building – Palazzo Strozzi.

But that will be another story.