"Renaissance Madness" or "What Happens in Florence...Stays in Florence"

When we rolled back into Academy Hostel in Firenze (yes, Florence), it was much like when we had returned for a second stay at La Controra Backpackers Hostel in Napoli earlier in the month...we were greeted as if we were rock stars! It must be interesting for the hostel employees to get to see people that they liked return for another stay, particularly so they can learn if their travel advice was a) heeded, and b) valuable. Marco, the main dude at the Academy Hostel's desk had given us a LOT of travel suggestions when we had been there for one night toward the beginning of our trip and it was really fun to sit down with him the second time around and tell him that in fact we HAD seen some of the places he wanted us to see.

Now Firenze is an amazing city. It's small and walkable, yet simultaneously large and vibrant. It's heart is liberally sprinkled with historically important sites, and yet this history is simply woven into a normal way of life for Italians. Florentines seem to still live the way they did hundreds of years ago, eating the same foods, living in the same structures, socializing in the same ways; and though they seem to understand the significance of all the historical architecture and art surrounding them, they also seem to just casually regard it as normal, as "the way it is". Life goes on for them as amazed tourists' LCD screens capture glimpses of history their countries lack. Even though some modern conveniences have clearely woven their way into the society's fabric (i.e., cell phones, televisions, cameras, automobiles/scooters), it still feels like you're taking a step back in time to wander its medieval streets. People actually still do ride old, creaky, single speed bicycles to get around town. Or they walk. And they stop to chat. They move slowly. Businesses close for several hours in the afternoon so people can go home and eat, sleep, or spend time with their families. Stress levels appear to be comparatively low, though Americans in general are more stressed out than anyone, aren't they?

Speaking of the historically unchanging, take for example, the Ponte Vecchio (or, "Old Bridge") over the Arno River. Back in the 1500's the bridge was lined on both sides by slaughterhouses. However, the rich and powerful Medici, the ruling family at the time, decided they'd had enough of the smell as well as the blood rolling down the bridge into the river and into the streets of Florence. They ordered all the slaughterhouses out and replaced them with jewelry merchants, whose shops exist to this day, essentially unchanged for 500 years. A walk over Ponte Vecchio today brings sights of jewelry store after jewelry store, right there on the bridge. At the end of each day, each of the elaborate, built-in, antique hardwood storefronts are folded up and locked securely, to be watched over by the bridge-patrolling carabinieri (military police) throughout the night. At dawn, the merchants slowly arrive and go through the laborious, daily process of unlocking their shops, unfolding the maze of shelving, and individually putting each piece back on display for another day's trade. As it was is how it is. We could learn a little something from that, I think.

We had happened to arrive in Firenze during the one week of the year that all museums are visited for FREE. This saved us a lot of money, but also made us have to really plan out the logistics of our museum visits. Given that we were there for a Friday-Monday period, and that some of the more famous places are closed on various weekend days, we had to plan out a detailed museum visit schedule. Since it was free museum week, and since we hadn't purchased any admission tickets in advance, we determined that to make sure we got into the two most important galleries, the Uffizi and L'Accademia, it would be wise to get there really early in the morning. So we planned our Uffizi trip for Saturday morning early and our L'Accademia visit for Sunday morning early.

Saturday morning's Uffizi gallery visit went just as we'd hoped: early arrival, 45 minutes in line, among the first in, and in/out fairly quickly as the large crowds were behind us. It was very impressive seeing the world's largest collection of important Renaissance art, although both Trip and I felt that a lot of the significance was lost on us. Neither of us being particularly well-educated in Renaissance art, we traipsed in three hours through a gallery that many say is not able to be fully appreciated in an entire day. Honestly, it all began to blur; however, there were some really, really amazing paintings by Il Perugino, Botticelli, and even DaVinci and Michelangelo.

Sunday morning's L'Accademia trip went just as I'd hoped. Note that I say "I", because I was alone for that one. Well, technically I was with a Norwegian girl from our hostel for a while, but what I meant was that Trip was not with me. No, I was unable to awaken Trip that morning after the previous evening's festivities so I had to ditch him and visit the Accademia while he snored off his bender. While I am not at liberty to divulge all the details, apparently there were some after-hours festivities that took place the night before which rendered Trip unable to function effectively on Sunday morning. I, unfortunately, did not get to witness all the festivities as I'd left alone (while still coherently functioning) Saturday night from the second pub of a multi-pub crawl. All I will say is I later heard tidbits of stories of drunken, shirtless pole dancing, on the bar, in front of an admiring and cheering, and, shall we say, largely alternative crowd. Oh my. Anyway, I am still trying to gather photographic evidence, not that I will share it with all of you, of course. He IS my best friend, you know. But, as I was saying...

L'Accademia is a gallery that houses Michelangelo's iconic David sculpture. I was able to sneak a couple of illegal photos of the sculpture because I was one of the first people into the gallery that cold, drizzly morning (yes, the Norwegian girl and I stood in line for the obligatory 45 minutes at the butt-crack of dawn in order to ensure we got in). David is AMAZING!! I had heard that it is the perfect sculpture in every way, the perfect form of a man, yadda yadda yadda. Well, I was shocked to be shocked when I saw it. The rumors were true. I walked around and around the statue, admiring it from every angle. It honestly does look perfect from every angle. Really. And, it is absolutely HUGE. It stands about 15 feet tall and literally dominates the room. David's head and hands are noticeably bigger proportionally to the rest of his body, but this was intentional because the statue was originally created to be placed high above the viewer, from which point the head and hands would have looked perfectly proportional. Wow. Furthermore, when looking at David from the right side, you can see his calm, boyish, relaxed manner portrayed. However, when gazing at him from the left side, you see the tough, strong, wary, victorious David who has just slain the mighty Goliath with just a single rock from his slingshot. David is simply stunning and was definitely one of the highlights of the entire trip. I got chills, literally, just standing near this famous Michaelangelo piece, and he carved it at the age of only 29 years!

The Capelli Medici is the ornate chapel and mausoleum of the rich Medici ruling family that ran Firenze from the 14th to the 18th century. It is basically a testament to their richness and their arrogance, a fabulous flaunting of their immeasurable wealth. The huge octagonal chapel is literally covered in the most intricate of marble slabs and inlays. The work is so precise that it inspires amazement and wonder; it is shocking that anyone could carve rock in such ways and fit it all together so that it looks like it was painted. The work on all the walls, floors, and altar is so perfect that it is hard to see or even feel seams in it; you can almost believe it is pieces of solid marble that were mined as is. Unfortunately, I have no photographs of the chapel because the photo police were out in full force that day. In the mausoleum, two famous Michelangelo sculptures (Dawn and Dusk/Night and Day) adorn the final resting places of Lorenzo the Magnificent and Giuliano de'Medici, two of the most prominent and powerful Medici dukes. Night is portrayed as a woman preparing to sleep while Day is portrayed as a powerful, muscular man preparing to get up; seated side by side, they are lovers connected by the calendar for eternity.

After L'Accademia and the Capelli Medici, I just wandered around the old city taking it all in, framing photographs, nursing lunch at a little outdoor cafe, resting now and then in places where people have been resting for more than a millenium. The facade of the Basilica Santa Croce was fantastic, but I thought the innards were average by Italian cathedral standards. Of note, though, was that Michelangelo's tomb was inside, and seeing that was a fitting finale to seeing the multiple Michelangelo works dotting Florence's art landscape.

So, believe it or not, after the day of wandering around Firenze alone, I finally rendezvoused with Trip later that evening at the hostel. Turns out he'd woken up at 10 a.m. (3.5 hours after I'd left) and had been seeing all the same stuff I'd seen that day, just hours behind me. I was impressed by his ability to rally because I thought for sure he'd be completely worthless for the entire day, unable to achieve a vertical position due to a pounding hangover. I was glad to hear I was wrong, and he didn't miss out on the day's sights. And he would have missed out, because the days we went to these places were only days they were open during the time we were there...

(Random thought....Italian sculptures rock! So realistic, so life-like, so violent! I saw men fighting horses, men killing each other, women killing men, men killing lions, battles on horseback, triumphant poses with a severed head held high in one hand and a machete in the other. It was weird, being in a place that is now so peaceful, but getting a constant glimpse into the violent history that pervades daily life. Then, immediately adjacent to the violent scenes forever entrapped in stone there were the beautiful religious sculptures of Adam and Eve, the Madonna and the baby, and various apostles/bible scenes that were so peaceful, sweet, and loving. What an interesting juxtaposition. But wait, I guess religion and violence do historically go hand-in-hand, don't they?)

That night we had dinner with a Brazilian dude named Georges at a little haunt behind the Duomo. We got lured in by the relatively inexpensive meal (9 Euro for a plate) but raked over the coals with the ridiculously expensive Coca Cola (4 Euro for a 2/3 full glass. Dinner was a delicious lasagna, with some tasty fagioli beans, yummy bruschette and an average green salad.

The next a.m., we woke early for our final day in Firenze. Particularly cool that day was another treasure trove of Michelangelo madness - the Bargello Museum. Not only was Michelangelo out in full force there, but his contemporary Donatello was a sculpting star as well. In fact, Donatello sculpted a few of his OWN "David" works, and it was interesting to see the difference between his and Michelangelo's. We also climbed to the top of the dome of the Duomo (duomo actually translates as "cathedral", NOT "dome", surprisingly). Inside the massive dome was a 360 degree fresco (painting) of hell and heaven, with angels, demons, and people ascending from below to above. There were two circular walkways, one several stories above the other, that allowed viewers different perspectives of the paintings close above and the duomo floor far below. One of the most fascinating things about the fresco in the dome was the perspective it required. Up close, the wall looked like simply plaster with large, meaningless paint smears randomly applied. But, turn around and gaze 150 feet across to the far side of the dome and all of a sudden you are viewing an incredibly detailed and magnificent fresco replete with all of the accoutrements of heaven and hell. It's like you're standing in the middle of the painting as it swirls around you, and in order to see what it actually is, you have to look clear across the dome. I have no idea how an artist could paint something like that up close...how many times must the artist(s) have had to stop painting, walk half the circumference of the dome, turn around to view the unfinished work, walk back and paint some more, stop, walk back around, etc., etc.?? I guess that's why the massive fresco itself took over 13 years to paint.

After viewing the inside of the dome fresco, we finished ascending the steep, slanted stairwell and emerged into glorious, warm sunshine on the top of the dome with limitless views in every direction. Florence viewed from above was truly a sight to behold. Like I've relayed throughout these blog posts, we climbed towers throughout Italy to get a) some exercise, and b) a perspective on the city and countryside impossible from street-level. Florence viewed from up high did not disappoint, and was probably the best climb we took. The top of the dome was large and had impressive marble columns, as well as room for many more people than the other towers we'd climbed. The day was partly sunny, with just enough cloud cover to avoid washing out all our photographs and still provide us with a little shade.

After heading down, we hit a street market where I picked up a leather purse for my mom, a sweatshirt for myself, and a few postcards. Back at the hostel that night, I picked up the house guitar and sat outside on the balcony for a while, serenading no one in particular. At one point I glanced over and saw that a woman had walked up from the courtyard below and was standing at the top of the stairwell listening to me play and sing "Brown Eyed Girl". She gave me a shy smile and when I finished she smiled, quietly clapped, mouthed the word "grazie" (thank you), and then disappeared. A few other folks came out from inside the hostel to hang out and listen, including Arabella, the beautiful English girl working the front desk that I had an immediate crush on. It was a fitting near-ending to our Italian trip...hanging out in a beautiful country, in beautiful weather, on the beautiful balcony, with beautiful people, making beautiful music, having beautiful conversation. Later that evening, after one last trip to GROM for some amazingly beautiful, extradark chocolate gelato deliciousness, we were off to bed, packed and ready to rise early for a daytrip to San Gimignano...to be followed by travel back to Rome for our final night of vacation before flying back to the States.

"Bologna Magnet". "All Tracks Lead to Bologna". Or, "Oh Lord, Stuck in Bologna Again".

So when you buy a ticket for an Italian train, unless you go First Class, you are not issued a specific seat. The flexibility of this is beautiful because you can just jump on the train and find a place to sit, wherever you want, without the hassle of finding a specific seat in a specific car. It makes the whole process much quicker and easier to just be able to sit anywhere, particularly if you are running late and catching the train just as it's leaving. And, most of the time, First Class isn't any better than Second Class anyway, so spending the few extra Euros is sort of a waste. But all of this Second Class train-riding bliss hinges on one easily forgotten requirement...the validation. If you remember nothing else, validate. Validate. It will make your life much easier, I promise.

What does this mean? Well, there are little yellow boxes placed in various spots in the train station and once you buy a ticket you have to walk over to any little yellow box and stick your ticket in to get a date/time imprint, or validation. Technically, until you do this, you haven't really bought a valid ticket and if you ride the train, you can be assessed an immediate 44 Euro fine if the conductor catches you. Well, we almost always validated our tickets properly before riding the train; there WERE a few times we forgot, but we laughed them off when we realized it later because it was only occasionally that the train conductor would come around and check the passengers' tickets, and each time they had come around before, we HAD properly validated.

So...we left Bologna early in the a.m. and took a quick, 30-minute train to Modena to wander around for the morning on my oil and vinegar hunt (see last blog post). After we'd had enough of Modena we walked back to the train station and, as had become our custom, we bypassed the ticket line and headed straight for the self-service kiosk. But, when looking at the schedule, we quickly realized that it is very expensive to get from Modena to Florence, our next destination, and you can't go straight there anyway. We had no idea why, but when we tried to buy a ticket to Florence, ALL the different options included a regional (cheaper) train from Modena BACK TO Bologna, and then a super-fast Intercity (expensive) train from Bologna to Florence. Well, we did not want to go back through Bologna, but clearly we we had no choice. And, since we both remembered Bologna having one of the largest train stations we'd seen, we were just positive that if we got ourselves back there we'd be able to find some cheaper regional trains to Florence. Therefore, we didn't buy the expensive one in the Modena train station and instead we just bought a cheap ticket back to Bologna. This all seemed like a great idea, and maybe it was....UNTIL on the ride to Bologna we realized, as the conductor came tooling down the aisle, that we'd forgotten to validate our tickets for the short ride because we had bought them in such a rush two minutes before departure.

We were sitting ducks. There was nowhere to go, though when the conductor was only a few rows away from us we briefly considered hopping off the train and running when the train stopped at a very random and tiny station. But, we decided to just take our medicine, to be grown-ups, to just sit there and....PLAY THE STUPID TOURIST CARD.

When the conductor got to us and asked for our tickets, the show was on. I had opened up my shopping bag and was proudly acting the tourist part, admiring all of the oil and vinegar I'd bought just a short while ago in Modena, while Trip had the Italian/English dictionary and the Lonely Planet phrasebook out while pretending to study. The conductor politely asked for our tickets but, upon seeing no validation stamp, he began sternly giving us a rousing Italian talking-to. We sat there, acting concerned, smiling, listening, letting him rant. Then he got to the part where he was demanding the 44 Euro fine. We knew exactly what he was talking about...not because we could understand him, but because we knew that there was a penalty for what we had done. "Blah, blah, blah, blah, 44 Euro, blah, blah, blah." Anyway, we spent about five minutes just trying to confuse him by smiling, grabbing the dictionary to slowly look up words, thanking him, telling him that yes we HAD bought a ticket and it was right HERE, speaking fluent English and broken Italian, nodding, feigning ignorance, and just generally slowing him down so much in his job that he eventually gave up. He informed us that, not only were we not validated, but we were also sitting in First Class!! (See, I told you the extra money wasn't worth it because we didn't even know we had mistakenly sat in First Class.) So, when he told us that, because we knew there was NO fine for sitting in the wrong class, we immediately apologized for THAT transgression and indicated we understood what we'd done wrong. We then stood up, grabbed our backpacks and gear, and quickly bolted toward the next train car before he could try to collect the fine. He let us go. And boy, let me tell you, did we feel a full-on sense of victory! (Is this how a pretty girl feels after she bats her eyelashes and shows a little cleavage to the cop who pulled her over for speeding? I'll never know.) Whew, what a rush!!

So, we get back into Bologna and, again, head for self-service kiosk to buy tickets to Florence. You can imagine how pissed we were to find only the expensive Intercity trains going there. We were shocked...huge train station, trains leaving every few minutes, why none of the conspicuously common regional trains we'd been riding all month? Seriously, the expensive, faster train was only a ride of about an hour and five minutes versus what would have been an hour and 30 minutes on a cheaper regional train (if any had been running at that time). However, the cost difference was 52 Euro vs. 19 Euro (about 70 bucks vs. 27 bucks), which we thought was ridiculous for saving only 25 minutes.

But, then we found that we could get to a different Florence train station for 19 Euro, on a train leaving in only two minutes, and it was only about a five minute walk further away from where our hostel was anyway!! Sweet, sign us up! So, not having learned our lesson, we again bought tickets in haste (sound familiar?). As the tickets were printing, I ran from the lobby to the platform to make sure the train was there and didn't leave, and Trip stayed back paying for the tickets. Minutes later he ran up the stairs and met me at the train's open door. When we handed the ticket to the conductor and tried to board, he said something crazy about it not being a ticket. WHAT?!?! It listed times, the car number, the seat numbers, the amount we'd paid, the date, the time, everything! But he wouldn't let us on because apparently what Trip had grabbed from the machine was only "printed paper number one", the RESERVATION. The actual TICKET was "printed paper number two", but Trip had left the machine after only the first paper had printed. The train was now scheduled to leave and the conductor told Trip he had to run back down to the machine and see if the real ticket was still sitting there, otherwise we couldn't board. However, by the time Trip huffed it back up the stairs to the platform where I stood (having been repeatedly pleading with the conductor to not close the doors on us) the train no longer stood there next to me. Oh, and he didn't have a ticket anyway. It was nowhere to be found.

So, pissed at having just wasted money on two tickets we didn't even get to use, and now faced with a choice of a 52 Euro train leaving for Florence in 45 minutes, and another 19 Euro train leaving in 5 hours, we just gave in. We bought tickets for the cheap one that left in 5 hours, VALIDATED THEM, and resigned ourselves to go read our books in a familiar Bologna park while waiting for dinnertime and another "best Italian pizza" at Il Veliero restaurant. Clearly we were not meant to be leaving Bologna yet, after all of the afternoon's escapades had unfolded to leave us stuck in Bologna again. Bologna magnets. It seems all tracks lead to Bologna. But, I gotta say, the whole thing was just comical. Plus, it didn't really feel too much like defeat to have to hang out another five hours in the sunshine in Italy. Maybe there is a god, because I got to eat my favorite pizza twice!

And yes, we did make it to Florence that night, on the right train, at the right time, with a belly full of buffalo mozzarella, spicy salami, and eggplanty goodness. Thank god Trip woke me up, though, because I was soundly sleeping off my pizza buzz when the train rolled into Florence at 10 p.m. If he had not been there, I would have probably ended up in Rome!!