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A new favorite thing: cyclists riding effortlessly with umbrellas in hand.

My second day in Florence, I had a wonderful time at the municipal museums. I say, "municipal" because the national museums, such as the Uffizi and the Academy, were closed as they always are on Mondays. I really should have looked that up.


Another thing that would have been nice to know is that the streets would be clogged with festive teenagers. I’m not sure if it was the first day of school or not, but I had to practically swim to get through the crowds of them filling the streets outside of schools in the morning. I felt sorry for the drivers trying to get past the cliques of girls hugging and talking about their new outfits and the boys trying to mask their excitement with more manly sullenness.


Regardless of my negligence as a tourist, the tour I went on of Palazzo Vecchio was amazing. The tour guide is a professor of architecture who gives tours two days a week. You can imagine he had an interesting perspective on a structure that has been assembled in various styles over the course of the last 700 years. The only people on the tour were me and two British guys about my age. I'm not sure why they were in Florence because they didn't know who the Medici were and hadn't read any of the British authors who lived in Tuscany. But they were rather fun and very encouraging to the tour guide, and under those conditions, ignorance can be forgiven.


As we talked with the guide about the history of Florence, I found myself constantly drawn to "Tea with Mussolini" as my frame of reference for everything Tuscan. I took a whole class on the art and literature of Tuscany, and I don't know how many books I've read about it, but for some reason it keeps coming back to Judy Dench chaining herself to a medieval tower in San Gimignano.


It rained on and off most of the day, which is both a curse for tourists and a blessing, since the urine smell I have referred to so many times now vanished. During one of the breaks, I went to the Boboli Gardens at Palazzo Pitti. These were the private gardens of the Medici family, and quite beautiful. One of the highlights of the gardens was that there were a few birds there other than pigeons and crows. Namely, some kind of thrush and some kind of tit. I didn't bring my European bird book, but I’m going to pretend the thrush was the elusive Florence Nightingale.


Probably the most beautiful sight I saw in Florence though was in Santa Croce, the church which houses the funerary monuments and/or remains of many famous Florentines, including Machiavelli, Michaelangelo, Dante, Galileo, and Marconi. The church is being restored on the inside, so much of it was covered with scaffolding. In the dark church, the lights on the scaffolding used by the restoration artists were oddly beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I almost wish I could design a church altar myself out of scaffolding. It was the perfect bookend to a day begun with a conversation with the guide/architect about how Florence needs to find a balance between preserving its history and participating in the 21st century.


After Santa Croce, I found a restaurant some friendly Canadians ("We're from Ottowa, that's the capital!") recommended at breakfast. Unfortunately, it was closed, so I went to the restaurant next door which was nothing like what they described (nor should I have expected it to be).


On the subject of food in Italy, I should comment that I have found some of it disappointing. Not that is has ever been anything but tasty and delightful; rather, it may suffer from too high of expectations. Most of it hasn't been the mind-blowing culinary excursion beyond the experience of average Americans that people like Francis Mayes (Under a Tuscan Sun) would have you believe. And counter intuitively, I think my favorite meal so far has also been the cheapest. The things I've found that are definitely better than America are:

  • Ice cream (which, by the way, was invented in Florence as part of a culinary competition by a chef who would later accompany Katherine Medici to France and help establish what we now consider French food)
  • Gnocchi (I've never had any in America that I enjoyed, so making it palatable is an accomplishment in itself)
  • Caprese (the salad with tomatoes and fresh mozzarella)

I think the thing I'll miss the most is the cheese. It really is worthy of any Francis Mayes-esque description, but otherwise, I think America has done pretty well at adopting Italian cuisine. And in a few things, Americans have improved upon the Italian original. I'm speaking, of course, of pizza. While the pizza was good, I've had better tasting pizza in a similar style in Germany, Ukraine and Poland. And when you compare it to Papa Murphy's gourmet vegetarian, well, you can't.


Having finished my last Italian meal (for now), I collected my bags from the nunnery and took a cab to the train station, where my computer could be plugged in. I really don't understand Italian outlets. There seems to be two different standards, which is about the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard. (P.S. And now it doesn't fit the plug in on the train. What is up?)



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Here’s a quote from the heated conversation of the two Russian girls sitting next to me at the train station: “You see a basilica and say, ‘Ooh! Basilica! Let’s go inside!.’ Then we go inside. On the next street, again “Ooh! Basilica!” I think that’s as good an expression of the tourist condition as any.


About me

  • I'm Scott
  • From Lincoln, Nebraska, United States
  • Busily carving a niche somewhere between angels and apes since 1979.
My profile

    "... if you're not on videotape, or better yet, live on satellite hookup in front of the whole world watching, you don't exist. You're that tree falling in the forest that nobody gives a rat's ass about" (Palahnuik, Chuck. Survivor). This is my performative culture; I am your dancing monkey.