Ciao!
I know Kelly and Robert and I were in Florence for a day in the 80s. I know that. But don't remember a thing about the city. I can't remember what we did. Did we see the Duomo? Go to the Uffizi? Walk over the Ponte Vecchio? Or did we just fight in the train station? Anyway, it was all new to me.
You can view the pictures here.
I arrived in Florence on Friday and was taken to my hotel, which is really an "apart'hotel" on the river Arno near the Ponte Vecchio. Standing on the bridge one has lovely views up and down the Arno, but the real joy of Florence is the city centre, the Medieval and Renaissance areas which are compact and walkable and crowded with groups of tourists.
Friday I walked around and slept. Saturday I went to the Uffizi Gallery,Near the Uffizi is the Piazza della Signoria where Michelangelo's David once stood. There is now a copy -- under scaffolding. The original is in the Palazzo dell'Academia and is also under scaffolding. I'm just now clearly seeing how homoerotic the marble sculpture from that time was. It's also bulging muscle, lithesome stance, erotic wrestling.
Steps away is the cathedral, il Duomo, the dome of which was the first dome built during the Renaissance. You see the dome from all over the city, capping tiny alleyways. The tiny alleyways can be confusing, but they also keep the city cool and breezy. One also sees, hanging in the small alleyaways, number of rainbow flags. At first I thought, "how nice that they so clearly mark the many gay businesses and bars" but soon realised to my embarassment that they're anti-war flags printed with the word, "pace". I must ask Tim if they're anti Iraq war flags or anti-violence, but it's still wonderful to see so many of them.
Sunday I was going to go to Siena, but it rained so instead I took a bus to the small town of Fiesole where one can get brilliant views of Florence from the foothills. Unfortunately, it was too hazy for decent pictures so that will have to stay in my memory. Sunday night I went out to a small and rather dismal bar (the nightlife in Florence isn't so wonderful) but stumbled into an outdoor jazz concert in the Piazza della Signoria which was lovely. besides the rain on Sunday the weather has been really lovely.
Monday everything closed it seemed, so I went to the Palazzo Pitti. The Pitti is an enormous fortress like palazzo built by a wooltrader who was a rival of the Medicis. Unfrotuantely, he died before the palazzo was finished and the Medicis took it over. Ah, irony. Behind the Palazzo is the Boboli Gardens, which claim to be the largest and best-kept gardens in Italy. Parts of it are lovely, but my anglophilia is firmly in place and I found a lot of the gardens to be shambolic.
So, the food is stunning, although I'm sick of eating carbohydrates. Everything comes with bread. I had a rather fantastic meal of osso busco (stewed veal shank) and roasted potatoes. I also had some sort of white fish stewed with wine and tomatoes that was quite nice. Otherwise, I tend to mostly snack -- little panini from open air cafes and calzone, little tomato and mozzarella pockets. Then, of course, there is gelateria on every corner -- selling sweet, sticky, cold gelato. Melon has been my favourite, although I sampled a range, of course.
I haven't interacted much with people. They seem more polite than the French, but it's hard to tell. I'm learning very little Italian, but enough for the basics. I was surprised, although shouldn't have been on reflection, by how much I can surmise about the written language from the French I know. Once you start to see patterns the root of the words are quite similar that I can guess my way through some of it. So I'm not as hopeless as feared. Also, one knows the food lingua quite well.
So Florence was idyllic and artful. Rome was a mess. I had some sort of breakdown. Spent two days in bed with a fever. The hotel was small and dark. The city was humid and heaving with tourists. I queued for hours to see the Sistine Chapel. It was packed with people sushing each other. You walk through miles of muraled hallways so that the chapel itself is anti-climatic. One also gets a bit, oh I don't know, jaded, about the conspicuous wealth in the vatican when so much of the world is starving. Hypocrisy at it's height.
I came back early, glad to be sick in my own bed. Glad for the cold and the clouds and London itself.
