Everyone has a perfect day in Florence

I’m convinced. Yes I may have been wooed by the sunny weekend and pre-Easter "thin" tourist crowds, but I’m convinced that it would be impossible to have a BAD weekend in Florence.

Before I dive into that though- 2 quick recap items from last week since I was off on my posting schedule:

• I tried a new grocery store! I walked past it on the way to the laundromat the previous week and it looked bigger with more options at a similar distance away, so I gave it a go. Overall it went well with a slightly rocky start. I walk in, I brought my bags, I’m feeling ready to go, and I have to walk through a turnstile to get into the actual grocery area (weird, right?) and as soon as I cross over I realize I don’t have a basket. Panic. “Are the baskets on this side? Are they before the turnstile? Do I have to walk out then walk back in to get a basket? Do I think I can just carry all of the groceries I need? What if I use my bags? No, that sounds annoying.” In the end...mom, cover your ears... I found an empty basket that someone had left around, I waited for what I saw as an appropriate amount of time to see if they were coming back for it, and I stole it! Everything after that went pretty smoothly except that it is REALLY difficult to walk through a toiletry aisle when you don’t read the language- “Is that lotion, body wash, or shaving cream?”

• I went to Trivia with a group! I met 4 coworkers at an English Pub on the southwest side of Milan after work for International Trivia! The food there was pretty good, they had a few good BEERS on tap, and the trivia was in English. I felt spoiled but it was a nice night off from trying to understand Italian and figure out social norms.

Ok, now the good stuff. Florence. On Friday after work, I stopped at home then ran over to the Central train station again to catch my train to Florence for the weekend! I had heard nothing but the BEST things about Florence, and the weather was supposed to be great, so I was very excited. Train ride was fairly uneventful, though it randomly stopped between Bologna and Florence with no real explanation given, so we got in about 30 minutes later than planned. No big deal. We get to Firenze S.M.N, I hop out, and I immediately start looking for a restroom before my 25 minute walk to the hostel. I go left… no restroom, and that doesn’t seem to be the correct direction. I go right, no restroom and… wait.. That’s not right either. I go straight.. STILL NO RESTROOM. I give up and walk outside. Realize that left WAS correct after all. Ok.

As I am walking to the hostel, I kind of turn a corner and all of a sudden, there is the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Wow.

An absolutely incredible mammoth of this ornate, geometrical design just pops out in front of you. As I am walking by, I realize there is a large group of people standing out front and the doors are open. At first I think that maybe they allow visitors 24/7, but then I see people walking out carrying a cross and a line of people behind them carrying candles. Before I know it there is singing and they start parading down the street. I have no idea what this ceremony was, and frankly I didn’t follow to find out (I still hadn’t found a bathroom after all), but it was a kind of neat introduction to the city.

I get to the hostel address- again, minimal signage outside to indicate that I was in the right place, but there was enough that I knew which buzzer to press to be let in. A few moments pass… silence..Aw man, I’m going to be stuck outside aren’t I?.. Finally a head pops out from a window a few floors up, “Hello?” “Hi! I’m checking in?” “Ok” I hear the door buzz to unlock, I screw it up because I wasn’t sure if it was pull or push so I accidentally open and close it and it locks again…. “Hi! Sorry! Can you do it again?” Head pops out then pops back in. Door buzzes. Second time’s the charm or something.

I get upstairs and he says I must complete payment for the weekend upfront. No problem, my card is on file but “You pay in cash?” “uhh.. No? Card?” He gives me this look as if they don’t take card, and in the moment I forget that they have already charged my card and therefore could absolutely charge my card.. “Oh ok cash cash cash. I’ll pay with cash” Also without realizing (in the moment) that this almost wiped out my cash supply for the weekend which causes the rest of my travels to require much more strategy ha. He walks me to my room, the other folks staying there were already in bed (Come ON people). They seemed nice but not necessarily talkative. I set my stuff on my bed, I find the restroom, and.. You guessed it.. I bolt.

I had passed a TON of interesting looking bars and restaurants on the way from the train station to the hostel, so I start walking back in the same direction. I end up walking into another pub (sometimes the convenience outweighs the desire to experience culture). I actually sit at the BAR, have a couple of cocktails and un panino for dinner. The place isn’t too busy when I walk in so the bartenders are nice and talk to me, asking what I am doing in Florence etc. I even get a couple free drinks from them :-) A little time passes, and out of NOWHERE, the bar is packed. There are college students studying abroad and groups of guys ordering shots. I make nice with one of the girls here abroad from America, and she even offers for me to come hang out with them at their table, but something about sitting around drinking with 21 year olds that think they’re hot stuff because they know that “grazie” is thank you (pronounced with a horrid american accent) didn’t sound all that appealing. So I head back to my hostel to get a good night’s sleep in preparation for a long day of art on Saturday.

I walk back into my room, everyone is asleep, the guy is snoring of course, and when I go into the bathroom the change the entire floor is wet from someone having showered. Gross. Night one in the books.

I wake up around 8am Saturday morning and make my plan for the day. I have a 930 ticket to Uffizi and a 1230 ticket to Galleria dell’Accademia. I change and head out to find breakfast before the first museum. I find an adorable little caffe on the corner (which only took cash… and therefore took the remainder of my cash supply for the weekend) and had a bowl of fruit, a chocolate croissant, and a cappuccino. Absolutely amazing. The cities in Italy to which I have been so far all kind of feel like college towns in the mornings.When I was in Columbus, on those rare weekend mornings that I was up before 9am, walking through campus or down High Street was like walking through this beautiful ghost town. I have so many memories of the sun shining, a slight chill in the air, and feeling like I was only 1 in 100 people in the entire city awake. That’s the exact feeling I get in Italy before 10am. I don’t know if everyone just stays inside or if they truly don’t wake up early here on weekends, but there is this calm before the storm in the mornings. And when the sun is shining, and you are sitting on a street corner in Florence enjoying a cappuccino and a croissant, there is very little that could make that moment better.

I get to the Uffizi right on time for my ticket entry (I don’t think they really regulate the time too strictly, but I wasn’t taking chances). I can’t help but wonder how it could possibly get MORE crowded during “high season,” and yet apparently it does. I feel like I am fighting through 3 tour groups at each painting just to get a good look or read the sign below it, but everything is still pretty incredible.

The first room is an exhibit of work done by Elisabetta Sirani. I liked many of her works, but I mostly loved that there was a female artist from the 1600’s being shown so prominently- girl power.

You then walk up another set of stairs to enter the the main set of corridors. The Uffizi is set up like a ‘U’ shape with sculptures and paintings in the hallways and a few dozen rooms off the corridors with more sculptures and paintings. Again, I’m sure most every painter in there was famous in their own right, but this museum holds art from Botticcelli, Michelangelo, Bellini, Da Vinci etc. as well as sculptures from Roman times in the 1st and 2nd centuries. Pretty incredibly. Below are some of my favorites:

The Botticelli “Primavera”.

From http://selectstudyabroad.com/2013/05/art-in-florence/:

“Botticelli’s painting is a microcosm of the cultural rebirth of the Renaissance, but like the riddle of the sphinx, the painting baffles the viewer with its subtle clues.

One of the favorite stops in the Uffizi is the Botticelli room... the Primavera remains a controversial work. The title, Primavera or “spring,” should be read more as the “Allegory of Spring.” Starting from the left we have Mercury, the three Graces, Cupid, Venus, Flora (or Spring), Chloris, and Zephyr (or the March wind). Together, these figures convey the idea of spring. Along with the idea of spring come the expected associations of fertility and growth as emphasized in the fruit trees and flowers. We have no idea who commissioned it or for what purpose, though it has famously been associated with a wedding gift to a lesser-known Medici that (according to the scholarship) had it installed in a bed. Because of this, it has also famously been associated with marriage and love, and not just any love, but the particular kind of love they liked to talk about in the Renaissance, Neoplatonic love.”

Michelangelo the Holy Family

Hermaphrodite

I absolutely love how the Greeks and Romans play with sexuality in their art. I personally find it humorous that almost 2000 years ago they created art openly with topics that are still so taboo today

Woman Washing the Dishes

Because when you spend hours looking at many of the same religious scenes and all of a sudden come across something so real and true and common… you love Giuseppe Maria Crespi for it

Adoration of the Magi

There is an exhibit going on right now that essentially shows draft versions and versions prior to restoration of this painting alongside the “final” product. It was amazing the see the process and learn a little more about how they restore paintings

Alright. Phew- right? Your tired just reading about all this art? Yea, I know. Cultural and artistic overload, but it was only the beginning…

Next I headed to the Galleria dell’Accademia. I saw a lot of really interesting art, but the big piece here (both literally and metaphorically speaking) is the statue of David. Italian artist and architect Vasari said of it: "Whoever has seen this work need not trouble to see any other work executed in sculpture". I must say, it lives up to the hype…

(the toes that were damaged when a man snuck a hammer into the museum in the 90s I think and tried to destroy it… bizarre)

After a couple of hours wandering the Galleria, the next stop was Il Museo di San Marco. San Marco was a convent/friary until the 1800’s when it was seized by the state. The museum now holds the largest collection of art by ‘Angelic Brother John’ (Fra Giovanni Angelico) as well as significant architectural pieces of old buildings which were destroyed. Random but neat. Part of the museum are the cells/bedrooms of the friars that used to live there, each with a fresco on the wall.

One room also held some paintings which were in the middle of being restored which was super cool. Scaffolds in place and everything.

I originally was going to squeeze in ooonnneee more museum on Saturday, but my brain couldn’t take it. So instead I wandered, grabbed some gelato, and look at the sculptures in Piazza della Signoria.

(David replica in the background)

I had signed up for a “Wine tour at Sunset” which was to start at 5:30pm, so I started heading towards the Ponte Vecchio to meet the group. We met at a center monument of Benvenuto Cellini.

The Ponte Vecchio is a famous bridge in Florence that might be one of the only ones in Florence which still has stores along it. I found out during my tour that the Ponte Vecchio is the way it is today because one of the Medici’s (I think) was trying to impress someone else. Basically (if I remember correctly) he had an architect build the corridor you see that extended 1 kilometer including over the bridge. Then they kicked the butchers out of the shops because they made the place smell bad and put goldsmiths and jewelers in their place, and to this day you will still find high end jewelers along the bridge.

So our group collects itself and in the group of 11 tourists, all of us are American. There were 4 girls studying abroad in Barcelona who were on spring break in Italy, a mom and her two daughters from New York/ California, and a mom and her two sons also from New York. The one son was doing a “semester abroad” but really just taking a single 2 credit online course and taking 3 months to travel Europe. I was pretty jealous to hear about it.

Everyone in my group was sincerely wonderful. Our tour guide was this “pocket-sized [italian] woman” (her words not mine) that told excellent stories about the city as we walked from the Ponte Vecchio to the Oltrarno area on the other side of the river. We walked by Palazzo Pitti where she told us the Pitti family wanted to show the Medici’s up and build a bigger, more beautiful palace, but while building it, “shame of shames, they ran out of money!” Ha. So a later generation of the Pitti family had to sell the palace to none other than the Medici family! Cruel, cruel irony.

Our guide also taught us that if you see a little wooden door like this

It was actually a wine seller. Basically folks who made their own wine wanted to be able to sell it, and I can’t remember if this was legal or not, but basically you could go up to one of these doors on the side of someone’s home, knock, hand money in and they would shove a bottle out haha.

Finally we get to our first stop (honestly not quite sure where we were because there wasn’t a good sign outside). We sat for quite awhile and tried 4 different types of wine and 3 different types of bruschetta while our guide, who is also a manager at a vineyard south of Florence, taught us about the wine. The Vermentino, the Chianti, the Chianti Classico, and the Super Tuscan. All very good, and we were all feeling very good by the time we were leaving.

We then made a quick stop at a second restaurant where we filled up our wine glasses (on draft), and then took a “picnic” of more bruschetta over to the Cathedral. She told us how when the cathedral was being built, the Florentines wanted it to be the biggest in the world (I’m sensing a theme here). As it stands today I believe the church is 4th largest in Europe but the dome is the largest brick dome in the world (may need to double check that).

After the tour was over, I stayed a few extra minutes talking to the mom and her two sons about being in Europe alone and travel and restaurants and going out at night etc. I told my mom later that she would have been SO pleased because Renee immediately went into mom mode when she found out I was here alone- “Are you staying somewhere safe? Do you need someone to walk you there? Do you have everything you need?” It was adorable. She also invited me to hang out with her sons after dinner haha. I ended up being too sleepy, but it was very kind and thoughtful.

Anyway, I had learned a trick from the brothers to use TripAdvisor to make a reservation at a restaurant. This trick allows me to 1) actually get INto a restaurant and 2) not have to talk to anyone on the phone in Italian. Win win. So I made a reservation at Osteria Vecchio Vicolo. I had a LOVELY dinner, all by myself, and was absolutely ok with it. I tried their homemade wine and had huge plate of amazing homemade spaghetti with black truffle sauce. Holy moly. That said, I had already had 5+ glasses of wine and then accidentally ( kind of) ordered half a bottle of wine with dinner soo add a plate full of pasta on top of it and I was out for the count. I fell asleep in my bed at the hostel, jacket and shoes still on, at about 11pm.

I wake up at a cool 0830… which was really 0730 because we went through our time change here last weekend. I try to formulate a plan, fail, and head out the door anyway. I walk across the bridge and up the hill towards the old (at least said to be) home of Galileo! Marked simply with a sign but totally worth it.

I walk back down said hill and up another hill, and another, and then up a bunch of steps on my way towards Basilica San Miniato. I see a sign for a rose garden on my left exactly as I need a little break, so I pull over and step in. Pretty good view and a few art pieces to boot. I sat next to the statue “Je me souviens” for a bit while I looked out on the city of Florence and watched a few other tourists take selfies.

As I get up to leave, an older man that had been sitting on a bench away from the crowd the whole time yells something at me in Italian. I look over, and he repeats it- something about a photo. So I start to walk over while I ask if he speaks english. He essentially says no but keeps talking to me haha. I understand when he asks if I am a student (I think) and I tell him, “No, I’m uh… lavoro in Milano” (working in Milan). He says something else in Italian that I miss and then he says, “You don’t work in Florence.” I don’t know if it was his tone or the way he gestured to the city, but I understood it as “One doesn’t work in Florence, they should only enjoy it” Not a “ooohh you work in Milan not in florence, I understand what you’re saying” Ha. So I nod and smile and essentially try to say, “Yes, Florence is beautiful and it is a beautiful day and I will enjoy myself” without so many words. I think he kept talking in Italian, as I started to turn away, but then he said “Ciao” and blew a little kiss. Maybe I completely misunderstood him, but with the mindset I was in I felt like he and I had a MOMENT. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

So I finish the trek up the hill to the level of the Piazzale Michelangelo. I see a little caffe just to my left and get very excited as I had not yet eaten anything or had any coffee. So I walk in, I look for an indication that they accept cards (remember, totally out of cash at this point), and I see a card reader but I also see a big sign that just says “CASH.” So I ask “Tu accetti carte di credito?” And she says yes but there is a minimum of 10 euros. Ok, I can make that work. I need sustenance. So I go out and grab 2 bottles of water from a fridge and order a cappuccino and a croissant and ask if that’s enough. She says no. So instead of backing down or panicking, I say “Can I pay for their coffees?” pointing to the two gentlemen behind me. They hadn’t been listening so they misunderstand and think I need a translator and they step up ready to help. I clarify that I just need to buy a minimum amount of goods to use my card. The accept my offer and order two espressos. Still not at 10 euros. So I go to the couple behind them! Two more espressos and STILL not to 10 euros so she throws on a pack of gum and calls it good haha. The 4 folks all tried to hand me a few euros, and I adamantly decline. “We’re Italian! We have to pay you back!” I laughed and absolutely refused. I ended up chatting with the two guys who had been behind me for a few minutes about the struggles of going to a new country (the one guy had been to Philadelphia and said he has been studying English for years and still struggled to understand people when he went.. HA). We said goodbye as I went to eat my croissant outside, and I felt completely thrilled that I had run out of cash and was able to have that encounter. Il dolce far errori, #amiright?

So after I finish my croissant and cappuccino, I walk over to the Piazzale and sit and enjoy the view of the city again and get to see yet another replica of the statue of David. What a great morning.

I decide it is time to move onward. I head back down the hill and over towards Ponte Vecchio with plans of going IN the Palazzo Pitti. I get there and realize, man, I only have a few hours left before my train, and I don’t think this is how I want to spend it. I turn right around and continue over Ponte Vecchio instead and go to the Galileo museum! It’s a smaller museum but filled with old instruments and tools and experimental setups (both real and replicas) from maybe 1600’s forward in Astronomy and science. As an engineer, it was absolutely fascinating.

And also this...why you ask? I have no flipping idea. (If you can't tell... that's apparently Galileo's finger.. and tooth...)

After leaving the museum, I decide to spend my remaining hours wandering the streets of Florence, eating amazing gelato..twice (yes.. I literally got two separate gelatos within maybe an hour… no regrets..#imanadult #idowhatiwant) and taking in the city. It felt good to just sit for a while in the Piazza della Repubblica near the carousel and then Piazza di Santa Maria Novella breathing in the city.

I still got to the train station about half an hour before my train was to leave. I didn’t see a nice spot to sit and wait in the main area so I go to the restaurant on one side to get a coffee and sit in there. I decide, for whatever reason because I was in no way hungry, to order a pizza. So, in both my proudest and maybe least proud moment, I ordered, received, and ate an entire napolean style pizza in about 25 minutes and still made it to my train with minutes to spare. I’m pretty much a winner.

Overall, I only hit about half the tourist spots I meant to, so... I do, I do, I do wish I will come back to Florence.

(the wishing pig.. Or the lucky pig? Or something like that where if you rub his nose then you will come back to Florence)

See you soon!