Florence

On to Florence, we spent most of the afternoon travelling and getting our bearings. We dined at a lovely Osteria recommended by the hotel and I was yet again surprised by what I ordered. What I thought would be toasts with prosciutto and cheese turned out to be balls of fried bread (picture hush puppies but standard bread dough) on a bed of prosciutto with something like cream cheese for spreading. Fabulous, but not for the faint of heart. At this point, Alex is just about at chianti and pasta burnout level. I did manage to get him to stroll over to the Duomo to get a look at the Baptistery doors and the cathedral. Evening was actually a great time for this since there were no crowds mussing up the view! The façade of the cathedral is absolutely breathtaking; I’ve never seen anything like it. Just think how many lifetimes of crafter’s work and how many artistic treasures are contained in one vantage point.

We are the ideal Florentine tourists, dutifully making our way from the Duomo to the Uffizi to the Accademia, the Ponte Vecchio. I will say here that it is well worth while to reserve tickets for the large museums – I saw the lines and I would not want to spend my afternoon waiting to get into a museum. We also fit in the Chapel of the Magi in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi which I wrote my senior art history paper on in college. I know that I have tried to do too much but I can’t help myself, I’ve wanted to go to Florence since I was a little girl and I have to fit in as much as possible. Alex is worn out and leaves me to shop on my own the second afternoon, and I proceed to push myself to exhaustion walking the streets of Florence looking for secondhand shops or something besides the high fashion boutiques or sparkling gold but uninteresting jewelry in so many shop windows. Can I just say here that we could never get away with closing from 2-5pm for siesta every day as a retail store in America? Yet this is the way of life in Italy. I keep finding myself looking into closed shop windows just at the time of day when I’m ready to shop. Finally, I go back to the central market and actually have a good time trying on leather jackets and making deals. Then I barely make it for my “reserved” ticket to the Accademia to see Michelangelo’s David. I have never seen so many people inside a museum at one time – ever. The sculpture is at the end of a large open hall with a walkway around it (with a buffer zone of course) and no photos are allowed although I find it hard to believe the marble would be damaged by flashes. Despite the crowds and tour groups, though, I have to say that David is, bar none, the most incredible sculpture I have ever seen. Well worth the crowds, the wait, whatever it takes. Just perfect, in a way I can’t quite describe in words. I wish my dad, a sculptor, could see this and I had so wanted to take photos for him that would show more than the postcard images. In the end I had to buy him a book in the gift shop as a substitute. I resolve to convince him to travel to Florence one day…

Apparently there is some unwritten law in European tourism that every town must have a belfry, campanile, dome, etc. that should be accessible for tourists to climb and, as tourists, it is compulsory to do so. Tourists love vistas. They are always beautiful, fabulous photos bound, but really? Must every town, village, city be viewed from above to be appreciated? OK, I’ll admit we did Siena and a small fortress in Tuscany, but no more!

What I’ve learned from Italians:

They are great at:

eating
coffee
parking in tiny spaces
scarves
trying to understand your Italo-Spanglish attempt to communicate
fitting a bidet into the smallest bathroom imaginable
gas station food

Not so good at:

being on time
helpful signage
providing non-Italian food
chairs (apparently not necessary in most public places without a fee)
free water

Overall, we had a lovely time in Italy. In fact, it pained me a bit to leave since this was the part of the trip I had most looked forward to. But, I knew we’d have a great time in the destinations ahead so we said goodbye and boarded the bus (!) at the Florence airport gate that would deliver us to our plane to Brussels. So glad we weren’t late for the boarding call…