The Burgess Shale

Thursday and Friday, July 2-3 - Florence

We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, on our second day in Florence, to take a day trip to see Il Palio in Siena. Il Palio is a medieval horse race, ridden bareback and breakneck, with jockeys being thrown from their saddles and banners flying and tens of thousands of spectators whooping and elbowing and drinking. Hemingway would've loved it.

We did not go.

I'm still not sure it was the right decision, but at that point in our travels we didn't think we wanted to tie ourselves to the train tracks of sensory overload for a day. We'd just scratched the surface of Florence, so we decided to stick around and visit Santa Croce, the dome and interior of Il Duomo, and the Museum of the History of Science (all described previously), and eat amazing tuna/salmon carpaccio for dinner at Lobs.

Before dinner, we visited the "Interactive Museum of Medieval Florence" (Museo Interattivo sulla Firenze Medievale), at my insistence, because I expected it to be a cheesy, exploitative museum of TORTURE. Perhaps it had been, at one time — I suspect the proprietor of retaining half a dozen wax figures of torture victims from a more successful iteration of the museum, and trying to incorporate them into his gritty, bookish, dilapidated, painfully depressing vision of medieval Florence. We were given a headset to share, and were held hostage by the droning voice of the narrator at each station, staring at a leprous head or a severed hand for upwards of ten minutes while he read paragraph after encyclopedic paragraph about hygiene and markets. It was a relief when we were allowed into the authentic medieval hovel (replicated on the site of an actual medieval hovel), where the male narrator was exchanged for a perky female voice that explained all the details of the dank, dark, windowless room we were sitting in: the stale loaf of bread on the table, the dirt, the family of creepy-ass mannequins sleeping on the floor that we had to pick our way through to leave. It was altogether bleak. (There is another torture museum in Florence, at the Porta San Giovanni, which I hear is much more successful.)

Happily, adfamiliares is cleverer than me, and insisted we visit Oltrarno — the district across the Arno from most of Florence — in the evening. Crossing the river on the Ponte alla Carraia, we were stopped dead by an astonishing sunset, sinking down into the hills to the west and painting the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinità to the east (see above). We watched the sun disappear for about fifteen minutes, feeling quite terribly honeymoony, before entering the quiet streets of Oltrarno, where we found the Palazzo Pitti, the curiously blank façade of Santo Spirito, and the most compellingly odd dirty graffito I saw in Italy (see below). Coming home, we passed an outdoor orchestra concert at the foot of the Palazzo Vecchio, and milled with the crowd for a while, while masterpieces of Renaissance art looked over our shoulders from the Loggia dei Lanzi and light-up spinners spun into the sky from hawkers' ripcords.

( Cut for Florence! )

All ~100 pictures, including many more similar sunset pix, are here.

Wednesday, July 1 - Florence

We ate a lot of big meals in Italy. On our first full day in Florence, we decided we would skip one — we'd had an excellent late lunch of fish kebabs and bruschetta at Zà Zà, and a huge amount of pizza and mozzarella the night before with Dan C. and family. A big dinner just did not appeal. adfamiliares had been craving cannoli ever since we touched down in Rome, and every time we'd gone looking for a pasticceria it was after dinner and they were closed. So we took a pass on dinner and went directly to dessert.

We found a pasticceria with cannoli on the menu and ordered two at the counter — they seemed a little pricy, but hey, when would we be in Florence again? The fellow told us he'd bring them out to us if we'd sit down, so we did, at a table on the little cobblestone street.

After a few minutes of people-watching, we began to wonder what was taking so long. It was a sweaty evening, and all we had to drink was the thick, piping hot cioccolato adfamiliares had ordered. "Well, they have to fill them to order, so they don't get soggy," we said, feeling knowledgeable. Five minutes after that, we began joking that maybe they had to milk the cow to make the ricotta to fill the cannoli.

So we were a little tetchy when the waiter finally emerged. With a flourish, he deposited before us two big, steaming plates of cheese-stuffed pasta, swimming in meat sauce. We started to protest, "No no no!" but then the bottoms dropped out of our stomachs as it hit us: we hadn't been saying "cannoli." We'd been saying "canneloni." The menu said "canneloni." The waiter had, quite properly, brought us due canneloni.

We'd prided ourselves on escaping the clueless tourist stereotype — made an effort to communicate in Italian, covered our shoulders and legs in the churches, didn't get huffy when restaurants charged for water. Just that morning we'd had a little laugh at the expense of the British woman at breakfast who ordered caffè americano and told us about the "hard little slices of bread with nuts in" she'd gotten at dinner the night before. (She meant biscotti.) And there we were, nine hours later, stammering over two hot plates of canneloni while the waiter tried to figure out why we were unhappy.

We explained as best we could, and told the reluctant waiter it was our mistake and we would of course pay for the meal, and unenthusiastically tucked in. We were saved by the graciousness of the waiter, who reemerged, before we'd had two bites, with takeaway boxes and plastic forks, telling us how nice the canneloni would be as a picnic tomorrow. (They did, in fact, make a perfect lunch in our hotel room the next day.) Abashed, we crept away, certain that we'd been outed as ugly Americans before every real Italian person in Florence.

The next day, we saw the graffito above. Either it was a coincidence, or the couple stifling their laughter at the next table had a can of spray paint in their bags.

Tuesday, June 30 and Wednesday, July 1 - Florence

One of the things I like about Florence is how clearly it shows the residue of political scheming. Vicious squabbles and betrayals from five hundred years ago are evident in the buildings you pass as you walk the streets — an obliterated face in a fresco here, a bold coat of arms there. It's a city laid out by cruel calculation, mostly by the Medici, and it still retains a trace of that feeling.

We were lucky enough to be there at the same time as one of adfamiliares's colleagues from Skidmore and his family, who graciously showed us around the city on our first night, taking us past the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio and the overburdened Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno. (You can just see it at the right side of the photo above. The buildings are in the Oltrarno, on the other side of the river from most of Florence.) What a relief it was to be able to speak English for a whole night! They also clued us in to the best gelato in Florence, which we spent the rest of our visit trying to find again.

The following day, we didn't see a lot of things that were unexpectedly closed, and did see a lot of things I wasn't allowed to take pictures of, notably:

• The Uffizzi gallery. It contains room after room of splendid medieval art in gold leaf, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus carefully preserved beneath an enormous pane of glass. The wide hallway linking the galleries is lined with dozens of busts of famous Romans.


• The Basilica of San Lorenzo (to which the Medici Chapel is attached). In one side chapel, a sarcophagus of silver and rose-colored glass holds the tiny skeleton of a fourth-century Roman saint, still wearing his sandals. Beside him lie a dry palm frond and an inexplicable hollow tube about the size of a Slim Jim. (adfamiliares says it was Saint Caesonius, but I can't verify that online.) The dome above another chapel shows the night sky, carefully painted to represent the positions of the stars and planets on one particular night in the 15th century. Nobody knows what happened on that date.

Happily, I was not prevented from taking pictures in the streets. ( You know the drill! )

The complete set is here. (I have 18 more of these posts to make, by my estimation, so get comfortable.)

I suspect something uncanny is going on at the Medici Chapel. From without, it's a pleasant terra-cotta-tiled hump, a gnome's observatory or a Super Mario hill. Inside, it's a vertiginous octagonal marble room done in the colors of the sea and old blood (as though designed by the followers of some ancient briny fish-god), above a crypt filled with dozens of relics in cases of gold and glass and inlaid stone: the gold-chased fingerbone of a saint, a snippet of Mary's tunic, splinters of the True Cross, chunks of the pillar at which Jesus was scourged, part of the shaft of one of Saint Sebastian's arrows, a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. In a small corridor to one side stand two unfinished victory statues by a student of Michelangelo, and wriggling out of the neck-holes of the empty suits of armor are, on the left, a fat worm with a lion's head, looking very much like the chestburster from Alien, and on the right a blind, suckered tentacle. Then, in the next room along, the personification of Night reclines next to Day — but Day's face is a blank smear of marble slumping into his beard.

If I were Tim Powers or Dan Brown, I would be drawing some very unsavory conclusions about the Medici and the beginnings of the Renaissance, and linking them into a tenuous web in a book called Six Spheres of Blood or A Taste of Their Own Medici.

The Medici coat of arms — some number of red balls, usually six, on a field of gold, with the chief ball blue and covered in fleurs-de-lis once they got permission from King Louis XI to French it up — is everywhere in Florence. On statues, on street corners, on buildings, on cathedral ceilings. As one Medici contemporary put it, "He has emblazoned even the monks' privies with his balls." But the Medici were the folks who jump-started the Renaissance, discovering Michelangelo and sponsoring da Vinci, so I can't be too hard on them. Michelangelo designed the Medici Chapel, whose dome fills the window beside me, and all over the city shops and souvenir carts sell pictures of David's penis (sometimes with sunglasses).

Interesting things about Florence: each street has two sets of numbers, one red (or brown) for businesses and one blue (or black) for residences. Between 19 and 21 blue, for instance, you can find 62 red. You can see the system in action in the street numbers on Google Maps. Also, they sell tiny Shawn the Sheep (of Wallace & Gromit) figurines from vending machines of the sort that sell bouncy balls and Mega Sours in the US.

Annoying things about Florence: everything has an admission fee, sometimes multiple fees for different bits (like San Lorenzo and the Medici Chapel), and so far nothing with an admission fee permits photos. Grr. Contrast with Rome, which is full of stunning churches that you can wander into (provided your shoulders aren't bare) to discover a random Caravaggio hanging on a transept wall. Fortunately, they can't stop us from taking pictures outside; I took about fifty pictures of the Duomo at sunset tonight, in all its mammoth superdetailed multicolor-marbled glory. It's like a tsunami of stone, an eruption, a striped and decorated Death Star, cyclopean in both senses of the word. I think I've fallen in love. Tomorrow, we get to climb it.