The ringing telephone wakes me up. My room is pitch dark, and I blunder around before I find the phone. It's Ann, one of my fellow travelers. They missed me at breakfast; I've overslept. What time is it? After 8 a.m.--I was supposed to meet them for breakfast at 7:30 a.m., and we're supposed to meet our tour guide at 9 a.m. in the lobby. Oops. When motivated, I don't take long to get ready, so I dash in the shower, zip upstairs for a quick breakfast, and make it to the lobby with time to spare.
We meet Elisabetta, our private tour guide for the week. She is very nice and speaks English with a British intonation and a slight Italian accent. We find out later that her father is Italian, but her mother is English.
Florence is flat, and almost all the sights are within walking distance. Over the next week, we will walk walk walk walk. Elisabetta takes us first to the district of San Lorenzo and the Mercato Centrale. This market is a covered building, something like the Pike Place Market in Seattle, only without the fish tossing. There are vendors selling every kind of Italian food you can imagine--from wine, olives, cheese, to fruits and vegetables, and an astonishing array of meat...ducks, chickens with the feet on, organ meat; it's like a biology lab in there.
The San Lorenzo street market is interesting, but a little touristy. Sellers have these big carts where they sell t-shirts, scarves, shoes, leather goods, trinkets, you name it. Most of these vendors appear to be immigrants, either African, Asian, or Middle Eastern, and we are advised to bargain hard if we want anything.
We walk through the side streets and alleys to the Accademia, which is where Michelangelo's David lives. It's right at this moment that it becomes apparent why we have a tour guide--the line of people waiting to get in stretches around the block. But we have a reserved entry time, so we pop right in.
And there he is--David. He's become quite a cliche over the years--tacky plastic statues, refrigerator magnets with dress-up clothes--but standing here in front of him, you understand why he's a masterpiece. Elisabetta, who has a background in art history, talks to us about his proportions, his stance, what Michelangelo conveyed through his art. As we walk around the statue, I find myself in tears. "Do you ever get tired of seeing him?" I ask Elisabetta. Never, she replies.
On our way back to San Lorenzo, we take a coffee/Diet Coke break at a sidewalk cafe. Then we move on to the Medici Chapels, where most of the Medici family are buried. We walk into the Chapel of the Princes, which is entirely clad in marble, inlaid with colored stone. We also see the New Sacristy which has tombs with figures carved by Michelangelo.
We have lunch in a nearby cafe--Florence doesn't just have "restaurants"...there are ristorantes, trattorias, osterias, rosticcerias, wine bars, places labeled "self service" that look kind of like cafeterias, gelaterias, and panini shops. There are very few ethnic restaurants; over the week, I notice one Indian and one Chinese place. When I ask our guide about this, she said that Italian people just seem to like their own food best. And really, who can argue?
Anyway, our lunch is served by the fluently-Italian-speaking Ryan from Canada. My first course is pasta with pomodoro sauce, although this is nothing like the tomato sauce we have in jars. This is basically diced tomatoes and seasonings, and it is delicious. This is followed by a tortino tomate verde (green tomato tart), which turns out to be a little like a quiche. This is accompanied by a lovely glass of Brunello wine. Wine accompanies just about everything here.
After lunch, it's over to the Duomo and a look at the famous gilded doors of the Battistero, a separate building that was used for adult baptisms. And then it was on to Santa Croce, where I imagine Lucy Honeychurch without her Baedeker. Here we threw ourselves into the whole grab bag of experience--seeing the tombs of Galileo, Michelangelo, Dante, Rossini, and Macchiavelli. There were frescos, frescos, and more frescos, still beautiful and vivid even after 500 years. I also got to see the Cimabue crucifix that I had read about in the book Dark Water. Even badly damaged, it is still beautiful.
The Santa Croce district used to be home to many leatherworkers, and Florence is famous for its leather goods. Part of the church complex includes the Scuola del Cuoio, the Leather School. There were incredibly beautiful pieces of leatherwork on display--shoes, purses, belts, and you could go into various little rooms and buy directly from the artisans. There was also a wall of autographed photos from famous celebrites who had visited, including Noah Wylie and Jeanne Crain. Really!
Elisabetta leads us through alleys and lanes, showing us interesting little sights along the way--the church where Dante's Beatrice is buried, the building that was built on top of the foundations of the ancient Roman amphitheater. She also takes us to her favorite gelateria; on her recommendation, I get a cono piccolo of chioccolata. Now, I'm not usually a fan of chocolate ice cream, but this was outstanding.
That night, the three of us were on our own for dinner. We wandered around the streets for a little while, and finally ended up in the Piazza della Repubblica. There we chose Le Giubbe Rosse (The Red Jackets), where we ordered pizza and drank wine. The waiter, an older man, asked us where we were from. "New York", said the two ladies. "Wisconsin", I said, and the waiter gave me an odd look. "Near Chicago?" I added. The waiter smiled and said that when he was 19 years old, he spent "a beautiful day and a beautiful night in Rome with a girl from Wisconsin. That was 54 years ago." Every time he walked by our table, he'd shake his head and say, "Ah, Wisconsin", remembering his long ago romance. Somehow, the nostalgic romance of that story seemed just perfect for our dinner on the piazza.
It was also on this night that I had my quintessential Italian moment. As we were eating pizza margherita and drinking Chianti under the awning of the cafe, a young woman, accompanied by an accordionist, began singing opera under the loggia of the building across the piazza. My first full day in Italy has a wonderful ending.
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