Tuscany: 4-17 Florence

Well, it’s a fine travel tradition, and I’ve done it again. I sit here on a Tuesday night, having written nothing since Sunday. Haven’t taken any notes, either. There’s a rhythm to these things, and it usually takes about three to five days for the whole journaling process to shut down. Generally I get it back, but not like in the beginning. And now I’m in a hotel where there’s no wireless internet, and no place to plug in my laptop, so who knows when I’ll get to post this. In fact, the desktop available here, like the one in Siena, won’t dial up Mac.com, so I might be cut off from the world in general. Sad fact: I’m in one of the most artistically and historically rich cities in the world, and I’m wondering how to get online.

Greetings from Florence

Anyway, I guess I’ll start where I am: sitting on my bed in a funky hotel called the Monna Lisa in Florence. I say Funky because it has a multi-building layout, and it’s fancy and nice, but also ... well, one of the seven or eight rooms and/or courtyards you have to walk through to reach the lobby has numerous pictures like the Mona Lisa, several of which show her with either a hookah or a gigantic spliff, or showing some tit, or as a witch or vampire, or an alien. Like most old buildings, it was once a family villa, and there’s a garden out back that’s very nice, and the prices are outrageous, but I mean, the Mona Lisa getting stoned? Funky hotel, like I said.

We got here via some of the finest driving directions I’ve ever experienced. We were at Silvio’s place for lunch today, and he sat me down and basically said this: This would be confusing even for an Italian. So do this: Get on the highway to Florence, and keep going, no matter what, straight into town, past five or six lights. You’ll pass a big road with some pine trees, and then you’ll turn right, and then you’ll see Piazza di Michaelangelo on the left, and you’ll go down a hill, and cross the Arno River, then go up a hill, then see the English Cemetery on the left, then wrap around that, turn right at the first light, and then start following these written directions. Now, you might be reading that and thinking that it wouldn’t work, but let me tell, that was pure gold. I am skilled at being lost in foreign cities, and Silvio is skilled at directions, and at Tuscany, so we worked it out. And he had written directions from the hotel starting at the English Cemetery, and we followed those into ever-smaller streets, past ever-tighter turns, and finally into the back parking lot of the hotel. It was might fine.

Miracle in Siena

In terms of sheer driving pleasure, however, it was a different animal from yesterday, when I drove us back from south of Siena to the hotel. It matters that we were south because we had only approached the hotel from the north, and only left town going south. That’s because to leave Siena, we would always go the same way, following signs that said toute le direzione, or “all directions,” and then picking the towns we needed from a roundabout. No way in hell could I tell you what roads we were taking, or show it to you on a map, but I did it every day without trouble. Now, because we were coming in from the south, I had to do it backwards.

No worries, says I. You follow signs for Piazza il Campo, because that is close to the hotel, and when you get close to it and realize that you’re on the wrong side of it, you turn around and try something else. That’s because driving across the medieval part of Siena, or any other of these cities, is somewhere between terrifying and impossible. So you back out, back to the highway, and head north. And along the way you see signs for the stadium, which sounds familiar because you see those signs coming into town from the north. So you act like you’re driving to the stadium, and then follow signs for a gate, because you know you drive past a gate to get to the hotel, then you see the old fort walls and remember driving around those, so you drive around them until a road looks familiar, then you take that, and you see some tents that you recall seeing the day before in a piazza near the hotel, and you go straight for them, and before you know it Dad is singing your praises and Mom is waking up from a nap in the back seat saying, “Oh, we’re here!” Man, I love finding my way around these cities!

Dinner in Florence

So tonight (Tuesday) in Florence we went to dinner at a place which, for the first time on this trip, had no English on the menu. It was also, of course, the first time I didn’t have my restaurant cheat sheet with me. So we, and the German-speaking Swiss at the table next to us, had lots of fun trying to figure out, between my small knowlege of Italian and their daughter’s small knowlege of English, whether the ravioli had butter or what else, which one was the veal, what was in the salad, how the chicken was done, and so on. The staff spoke English but was mildyy rushed, but we figured it all out. My first was crostini (basically pieces of bread) with liver pate, Dad’s was pears and hard cheese called, I think, pecorini. Mom skipped the first. My second was the ravioli, which turned out to have ricotta and an herb in the middle, and butter and sage on the outside. It may have been pan-friend for a moment, because there was just the slightest crispness on the outside, which did a little dance with the butter and the soft cheese, and the pasta was rich and strong, and as you might imagine, it was f---ing good. Mom’s second was a thicker pasta called, um, we’ll say, bataglanetta – something like that – with meat sauce and butter. Also tasty. Dad had the ravioli, and I ate most of it. Our main courses were Dad’s chicken/rabbit/zucchini (all lightly breaded and fried, all good) and me and Mom’s veal chops, easily and by far the best meat we’ve had the whole trip. Cooked just right, tender and juicy, with nothing on it but a big slice of lemon. It is SO refreshing to ask the server how the veal is done and have her look at you with her big brown Italian eyes and say “Just veal.” Sorry, perhaps the eyes were irrelevant ... but not to me.

That restaurant, by the way, was called Buca Dell'Orafo. Over by the Ponte Vecchio. Highly recommended.

We got a gelato afterwards; this country is whacked-out crazy about gelato. It’s like a legal drug. Everybody is just walking around with gelatos, all the time. A scoop in a cone is like 2 Euro, about $2.50, and they completely pile it on. There’s at least as many gelaterie as coffee shops in Portland, and as many coffee shops here, too. Basically the whole of Italian cities, at least these medieval ones, are made for eating, having coffee and gelato, shopping, and walking around. It is an absolutely magnificent lifestyle.

The Big Game

Tonight, though, we got a cab back to the hotel, and the driver had the Milan-Barcelona game on the radio. I realize that not one single person reading this had any idea such a thing was happening, but trust me: the sports pages in Europe had nothing else in them this week. During the various seasons (each country has a league) there are other leagues, or sometimes cups, that happen throughout the year. So Milan might be late in the Italian League season, and maybe on Saturday they are playing a team from Rome or Naples or something, but they are also in the semifinals of the Champions League, which matches clubs from all different countries, and tonight they were playing Barcelona in that. I think it’s something like, if during the baseball season all the team from the Washington/Baltimore/New York/Philly/Boston area had their own little sub-tournament. And then there’s the UEFA Cup, which I think brings together all the league champions to play each other. And there’s cups within each country, and various city championships, and so on. These are annual things, unlike the every-four-years World Cup. And, for the record, I’m sure I’m not explaining this right. All I know is that Milan playing Barcelona is like UCLA playing Duke in college basketball, or the Steelers and Cowboys in the NFL, or the Yankees and Red Sox in baseball if they didn’t already play 27 times a year. Two absolute giants going at it, and I knew because every night I watch an English-language soccer show. So I get in the cab, and I hear the announcer calling out names I have become mildly familiar with, has he says who has the ball (without getting into much other detail): Donelli ... Umbrini ... Ronaldinho ... and as something would start to build towards a shot, his voice would rise as well, and the roar of the immense crowd would build, and then suddenly it would all drop off and he would say simply the name of the goalkeeper, or “troppo lunga,” which means too long. Or somebody would hit the post or something, and he would just explode with words for like three straight minutes. I didn’t get to hear a goal, but I actually managed to ask the driver the score, and he said (I’m writing this phonetically) “Bah-cha-LO-na uno, Mee-LAH-no zeh-do.” And that was the final. Barcelona 1-nil, on a goal by Giuly from Ronaldhino, their Brazillian stud, in the 57th minute. I saw it later on TV, and it was a magnificent thing. Ronaldhino (you’ll hear about him in the World Cup this summer) flicked it over three guys to Giuly, who let it bounce once and then leapt into the air and whipped it with his left foot from the right side of the goal, over the goalie, and bent it into the net. And as ESPN like to say, there was much running and jumping and hugging.

But Back to the Trip ...

Anyway, yes, I am on a trip to Italy, and we have been traveling around, but I tell you, that stuff blurs together after a while. You drive to a town, you walk around and see the sights, you move on. And we also realized that we hit possibly the busiest weekend of the entire year, because Easter is a four-day national holiday for Italians, and they all appear to take the time to drive around and see the sights. It’s like Memorial Day times 100, and everywhere we went, we encountered withering crowds. Still, there were highlights, and I’ll try to hit them here, as I can remember.

After resting like just-fed lions on Sunday, we got up Monday and embarked on a driving tour recommended by our tour book. We headed south from Siena through an area called le crete, which was described as badlands – but not quite like the ones in South Dakota, if you’ve ever seen those. Imagine those covered with lush grass, grazing sheep, and rustic farmhouses made of stone and terra cotta. In other words, imagine them in Tuscany. We drove along a ridge for a while, with particularly fine scenery all around us, and numerous places to pull off – each of them filled with cars, with people and cameras spilling out. And also, since this was the holiday known as “little Easter,” we kept seeing people picnicking. And I mean old-school picnicking: find a nice place, toss out a blanket, get out some wine and cheese and bread, and chill. The prettiest spot we cam across had tons of yellow wildflowers among olive trees on one side of the road and, on the other, a few dozen grazing sheep being watched over by a white dog. He was just lounging on the hillside above the sheep, keeping an eye on them and the dozen or so people by the road, and there was a house in the background, and it was almost too much. I put the photos on my Club Photo site, which is linked from the left side of the this blog. Too much! After a while the dog moved up and posed even closer to the photographers.

Our next stop was a monastery, known mainly for frescoes in its old section. Apparently Renaissance Italians considered a wall without a fresco to be a waste, and a church wall with them to be a sin. And so they frescoed mightily. The monastery, however, was closed for siesta by the time we got there – out in the country, especially, everything pretty much shuts down for a few hours after lunch, another thing the world could learn from Italy. So I missed these frescoes. But the gift shop was open, and I got a little clay jar filled with the monks’ honey.

We were going to stop at a town called Montalcino, which is in the middle of a well-known wine area called Brunello and said to have a great enoteca (basically a wine bar and shop with tastings) in its old castle, as well as “an untouched belle-epoque cafe on it main square. It also had so many cars, buses, and people that we couldn’t find a place to park within walking distance, so we bailed – and unfortunate trend. Do not come here on Easter weekend. From all I’ve heard, the very best time to come is in late October, when the grapes and olives are being harvested, the weather is cool, the foliage is happening, and there’s nobody here. Summer, by all counts, is hot and crowded.

Next we went to a Romanesque church from the 11th Century – which I mention mainly because I have no idea what Romanesque means, and I have a strong suspicion that 90% of the people visiting the church that day didn’t, either. It doesn’t matter, of course, but I like pointing these things out. This church is nice, though not terribly well decorated anymore; the dark interior pictures I posted the other day are from there. It’s called Sant’Antimo. To me, it was most interesting because it was a well-known stop on the pilgrimage route to Rome, in like the 9th and 10th Centuries. I mention this because I am eternally enchanted by the notion of a pilgrimage, an epic walk, for purely spiritual reasons, through different countries and unknown adventures, relying on the help of others along the way. We need more of that. This particular church is interesting because they apparently spent all their money on a nice new church (in like 1090 AD), went broke, and fairly soon ceased to even be a church any more.

After this, we went to a town called Bagno Vignoni, which instead of a square has a spring-fed pond, with the water actually bubbling up at one end. You can’t bathe in it, but you can sure enough sort through some gelato options while you’re admiring the water.

It was after this drive that I pulled off my Siena Driving Miracle, landing us at the hotel after yet another exciting trip the last two or three blocks of old Siena. Imagine driving through the crowd walking out of a football game, except that they’re all milling around and stopping to look in shop windows, and you’ve pretty much got it – except that Italians seem to accept cars as just another person on the street. They glance over their shoulders, see you coming, and move just far enough out of the way. Your job, as driver, is to move through the crowd as you would if you were a person, looking for gaps, being polite, but also moving just fast enough to create your own space. I have done it several times now, and ridden in two cabs that did the same thing at four times the speed, and I have neither seen nor heard a moment of despair or frustration, except some mumbling from the cabbie, who might have just been pulling for Milan.

Monday night’s dinner was at a place called Da Guido, and I actually took notes at this one, I’m proud to say. The place was a combination old-school local joint, with whole families sitting together, and somewhat touristy place, where all the staff spoke English very well – even to the point that when I told our waiter I wasn’t having wine (my nightly ritual) he said, “Ah, you forgot your ID?” Anyway, my point is it a very Italian, very friendly place, and the walls were plastered with pictures of famous Italians who have eaten there, 99% of whom we, of course, didn’t recognize. I picked out Luciano Pavarotti, Dad found Sophia Loren, Mom found Anna Maria Albergetti, but otherwise there were soccer players, poets, actors, singers, race car divers, bikers, random beautiful women – the whole Italian Pantheon.

For firsts, I had a traditional easter tart, which was kind of a dry spinach souffle in a crust, with a hard-boiled egg in the middle, if that makes sense. The thing about Tuscan food is they don’t screw around, and they don’t try to impress you. They just get goof ingredients and let them speak for themselves. I can’t remember even seeing more than two or three sauces the whole trip, and not one garnish. It is wonderfully simple, and in that way quite elegant and comforting at the same time. Anyway, Dad had goat cheese in a pastry shell, and Mom had a sald with hard-boiled quail eggs, asparagus and some mixed greens that included watercress, a very nice touch. There was also the standard bread basket and the ubiquitous olive oil, which is like chips at a Mexican place. An Italian table that doesn’t have bread and olive oil on it is a dresser.

For seconds that night, Mom had taglatelli with porcini mushrooms, a local delight; Dad had pica (another pasta) with meat sauce and porcini; and I had spaghetti with lobster, which I expected to be chunks of lobster but which turned out to be half a freaking lobster, with a cracker/scissors tool that I had never seen before—and had no idea how to use, meaning I had to call in the waiter for help. It was tasty, and a mountain of food. And there was still the main course to come! Dad had a veal chop, and I had roasted lamb with potatoes, both of which were a little over-cooked to our tastes, leading to several jokes about how Italians cook meat; we had been awed by how rare the massive bifsteak fiorentina was a few nights ago, and now this meat was overdone. They seem a little shake on meat, but everything else rocks – and, like I said, Tuesday night in Florence I had a veal chop that will the measure off all others in the future, and served with big brown Italian eyes, no less. Mom’s osso bucco was, she was happy to report, both good and inferior to hers.

So I think that’s all I can write for now; I’ve done 3,300 words in less than two hours, and my head hurts. We’re going to see Michealangelo’s David tomorrow: Did you know it’s 50 feet high and spent its first few hundred years outside? Well, now you do. And sometime after tomorrow I’ll tell you what it’s like to look at it.

Ciao!