Day 18: Thursday, May 8, Florence

oday was mostly spent in the Uffizi and Accademia. We had reservations at both but still had to wait in short lines. While waiting at the Uffizi we saw a guy who was dressed up as a Florentine statue – white powdered face, white Renaissance-type outfit, and two white pillars to frame him. It was the first good “pay money to take a picture with me” costume I have seen. 20 feet from him a guy was setting up to be an Egyptian Pharaoh/mummy, which is neither relevant nor original. It is easy, however, because you can hide behind a mask and not worry about keeping your face still. The Accademia is basically just Michelangelo’s David, his unfinished “Prisoners,” and a few lesser-known paintings. The David really is impressive, however, and is worth the trip. It was originally intended to go on top of a cathedral, so now that it is on ground level the massive statue (17 ft tall or so) is even more overwhelming. I eavesdropped on a tour guide who said that da Vinci was more of a scientist and thought that a work should mirror what is reality; Michelangelo wanted to “perfect” and expand on reality – hence his massive David whose proportions aren’t all quite right and his unfinished Prisoners. In that sense Michelangelo might be the first to foreshadow later movements – from Impressionist to Modern – that purposefully moved away from reality after art had moved toward reality for so long.

A lot of English names for Italian cities are obvious derivatives – we say Rome, they say Roma, etc. However, the Italian name for Florence is Firenze. How did we get Florence out of Firenze?

For an afternoon snack I had a sandwich that was sold by the kg. There was a big sandwich and you tell the person about how big a piece you want, then they weigh it and charge you accordingly. That night we ate at a buffet around the corner from our hostel. It was cheap and a good change. There was a cold meat plate, several cold pastas, a bread, lots of tomatoes and cheeses, and some mixed vegetables. I’ve liked Italian food, but the restaurants are all very similar in their offerings. There are very few vegetables offered – if there are sides available, one of the three or four is always French fries – and meat is expensive and comes in small servings. It’s very carb-heavy, and I couldn’t eat it for too long. On the other hand, what people eat in their homes is probably not the same as what restaurants serve, just like in the U.S. Our buffet meal was more like what I was used to from my previous Italy trip, and I suspect it is more like what is fixed in homes.

After an early dinner we went out about 7:30 just to wander the town. It seemed to be transition time: street vendors were packing up their wares and bantering with each other, lots of people were biking home in their suits, and the streets were relatively devoid of traffic. We headed for the Ponte Vecchio and enjoyed the beginning of sunset for a bit before crossing over. Rick Steve has a suggested route that goes east, so we headed west to get away from it all. We wandered into an area of town that obviously isn’t used to tourists. Italians were out laughing over al fresco dinner or drinks, many were sitting on the steps of monuments or churches watching everyone else in the piazzas, or walking home from work/out after changing. We headed back for the river and saw the tail end of sunset before heading home.

The Ponte Vecchio just after sundown.

Along the way we saw a lot of interesting things. There was a little railing with lots of locks locked to it or each other, and the end result looked like a cluster of grapes. It seems that someone attached a few locks just to do it, and then other people came along and slowly added more locks. We saw a McLaren SLR, a supercar that I had only previously seen in front of my Qatar hotel. We also saw a lady sitting at a table eating dinner while wearing what looked like chemistry lab goggles. No lie. We also passed a pair of Italians sitting on a Vespa and smooching away in a quiet alley, which is a very Italian thing to do. Walking back later in the night we heard someone playing the flute in the U-shaped courtyard of the Uffizi. He was playing along with a recorded soundtrack of movie scores; he was good, but we were surprised by the wild applause. We passed many deserted squares and the poorly-lit Duomo. The trash collectors were out and we saw small car-sized trash trucks that went down the narrow roads collecting garbage and then rendezvoused with normal-sized trash trucks, backing up to them and dumping their contents into the larger truck dump-truck style. It reminded me of bees buzzing around the queen.

We also passed a pair of black British ladies. That might not sound odd, but it’s a good opportunity to talk about race in Italy. Italy has been surprisingly homogenous. I have seen very few Africans here, and almost all of those that I have seen are trying to sell knock-off Prada bags from a black trash bag. That might sound bad, but it really is a safe correlation to make here. There is no ethnic food except for the Chinese restaurants I have seen that I can count on one hand. We lived on the edge of Chinatown in Rome, but other cultures seem to be on the edges of society rather than integrated. Italy has millions of tourists every year, but no other cultures seem to stick. Paris had a lot of Africans, and most of them seemed to dress like other Parisians and they came in all classes. In Paris it seemed (from my conversations) that Muslims were on the fringe, but other cultures had been integrated to a large degree. It doesn’t seem that way here in Italy. In Paris I saw a surprisingly large number of inter-racial relationships. Here in Italy if you find a mixed-race group of people, I’ll give you better than even odds that they are American. (That’s because almost all such groups I have seen have been speaking American English.) I’m not prepared to say this is a bad thing, because I don’t know if my observations are a result of 1) being in tourist areas and missing the diverse areas of town, 2) a simple fact that is the result of immigrants’ decisions to go elsewhere, or 3) an active hostility on the part of Italians.