Today we slept in until 8:00 and went downstairs for the hotel’s buffet breakfast, which I had heard was very good. It had eggs! Also, there was sausage and pancakes, as well as prosciutto and melon. And they made delicious cappuccinos to order---all in a lovely quaint room on the top floor.
Yesterday, we had a little trouble finding the bus (they are doing construction on the train station/bus terminal), but we figured it was productive since we needed to take a bus tour today. We were in the SITA (Florence’s bus company) bus terminal at 9:45, waiting for our bus, when a woman ran in, screaming to us and one other couple, “Hurry, the bus is across the street!!! It’s about to leave!!! Didn’t you get the fax???” Well, no, do you mean on the fax machine that I carry in my backpack? “You’ve got to hurry to get on the tour today, but if you miss the bus we can get you on the Saturday tour.” That’s good. Apparently SITA’s experience with foreign tourists is that they stay in Florence indefinitely. As we were planning to be going home on Saturday, we decided to run to the bus, leaving the other couple (one of whom was a gentleman who walked with a cane) in our collective dust. I thought we could warn the tour guide ahead that another couple was coming behind us, but Daniel makes it sound like we were in the amazing race!
The tour started at Piazza de Michaelangelo, which is a spot up in the hills overlooking Florence with an amazing view of the entire city, including Fiesole, a neighboring town that figures prominently in Etruscan history. We then drove across much of the rest of the city, stopping and getting off the bus for good near the city center. Except something didn’t get off the bus---Brandi forgot her sweater. She realized it and started getting upset just as the bus was driving off, and we were told there wasn’t a way to recover it.
This whole sequence had me worrying about spending the rest of the day with a very upset wife, until a woman in the back of the crowd started crying, realizing that she had left her camera at Piazza de Michaelangelo. Now, losing a camera is a horrible thing, and I felt really sorry for her, but it did mean that Brandi had to pass the Pout Pipe to her, which made me a little happy. Awful, I know. It was a taupe-colored goes-with-everything cardigan that fit my 5 ft frame perfectly and it was a bargain! He’s right, though, I can sometimes get a little upset with myself when I lose stuff…
We walked through the Piazza della Republica and toward the Duomo, the fourth-largest cathedral in the world. The Baptistry was built a couple centuries before the main church (between 1059 and 1128), and it is where Dante and several members of the Medici family were baptized. Built between the 13th and 16th centuries, the Duomo was conceptualized at a time when Florence had passed Rome as a center of European culture, and it was built to surpass the greatest churches of the time, though the new St. Peter’s Basilica clearly dwarfs it now. One of its best features is the fact that tourists can climb to the top of the dome, but unfortunately our tour did not go inside.
We walked on to the Accademia, which was originally meant to be an academy for the training of young artists. It changed into a museum, chiefly, in 1873, when Michaelangelo’s David was brought there, after previously being kept outside near the Uffizi, which sounds crazy. He was brought in to the Accademia to protect him from the elements, kind of like when my dad would tell me to bring the dog in when it had started raining, though I think it was more involved than that. The museum also houses several of Michaelangelo’s unfinished sculptures as well as a few other notable sculptures and paintings.
Unlike some of our pre-arranged tours in Rome, today’s tour had the feeling of being a little cheap. Our tour guide was pretty knowledgeable, but while most of the museum tours are equipped with little radios that allow you to hear your guide speak quietly, our tour relied completely on the lung capacity of the guide. If I had paid for a tour that included the radios, then I would be a little upset when another tour guide came in and started yelling at everybody, so it wasn’t too remarkable when the other tour guides started getting onto our tour guide. He started yelling back at them and being a little bit of a jerk in the process. He turned back to us and said, “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” These confrontations repeated a few times throughout our tour, which made us all increasingly more uncomfortable.
Michaelangelo’s David was probably my favorite artifact that we saw in Florence! Just because you have seen it in a book, don’t second guess its perfection. It is truly breathtaking work.
After a quick lunch at a pizza by the slice place (our least memorable meal of the trip), we made our pilgrimage to the Dante Museum, a three-story Dante exhibit built in Dante’s renovated house. It’s definitely not a big tourist destination--there were two people there when we arrived, and the people who showed up after us just wanted to know where the American Express office was. But for a Dante fan, it was a real treat. We learned about Dante’s early life and his exile from Florence, and there were many depictions of his Commedia.
We tried to visit the Uffizi, but the line was about an hour long, so we went to the hotel and came back at about 5:00 p.m., an hour and a half before it closed. We got in right away, but unfortunately we were there after they stopped checking out the audio tours. I was wondering what we were going to listen to but Daniel was clever---before the trip he downloaded some Rick Steves podcasts of notable places in Rome and Florence, and this was one of several places where they came in handy. We saw Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as well as numerous other Renaissance works, but unfortunately many of the works on the back half of the tour were missing descriptions.
As we were just about finished with the museum, a woman sidled up next to us, asking if the piece in front of us was marble or ivory. Turns out that she was an American who had spent time in Houston. Oh yeah, and she was annoying. She spent some time telling us how bad Houston’s museum scene used to be. (They only had an art museum and an opera, she said, which, last time I checked, is still ahead of Peoria and Siberia and a bunch of other places.) She kept up a 90/10 talking-to-silence ratio, telling us about every member of her family and the fact that she was in Italy for three weeks before asking us how long we were here. When we told her we were on a one-week trip, she said, “Oh, that’s better than nothing.” Thanks, lady.
It’s funny how quickly things can change in a tourist destination. The guidebooks are very helpful, but if you go to the places they recommend, you will find many more Americans than you would have if you happened upon it before it was “discovered.” Our dinner tonight was at Acqua al Due, a restaurant my friend Adam recommended to me. When he found it a few years ago, it was an unknown restaurant where nobody spoke English. When we went, pretty much every customer was an English speaker. So much so that in the middle of our dinner I distinctly heard the words Beaumont and Austin. We both popped up out of our chairs to go and introduce our selves to the two couples because it seemed so odd to run into someone from our own backyard!
The food was still very good, though. In addition to a bottle of wine, Brandi ordered a salad sampler (three different types of salad), and I got a pasta sampler (five different pastas). For our main course, I got their popular blueberry steak, while Brandi ordered cannelloni with ricotta and spinach. My first four samplers, vodka macaroni, blue cheese gnocchi, eggplant rigatoni, and spicy fusilli, came out before my steak, and they were all very good, as was the steak. I figured the fifth one was on its way, but when it didn’t come after a while I asked the waiter for it. After a couple minutes, he brought out a plate with “cannelloni”---a dollop of ricotta covered in red sauce. Besides being what Brandi ordered, it didn’t actually have any pasta. Brandi asked him about it, and he said, “Yes, it’s pasta with cheese and sauce. It’s very good, do you like it?” We pointed out that there was no pasta. “Oh, yes, that’s right. That’s how it comes.” We’re guessing he didn’t like it pointed out that they had forgotten 20% of the pasta sampler. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the waiter because I really felt like he needed to know that we know what pasta looks like but I still really enjoyed our meal there and our walk back through the cobblestone streets!
After dinner, we grabbed a Bailey’s on ice and went up to the rooftop patio to hang out. It was a great, relaxing end to our evening that mirrored the serenity of Florence. Since we had all sorts of extra battery space left on our camera, we both started taking silly pictures of each other. (Then I forgot to recharge the camera that night. Sorry we don’t have any pictures of the Ponte Vecchio, winery, or Tuscan countryside---but we hope you enjoy the million pictures of us mugging for the camera!)
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