Tuscany: 4-20 to Bologna

Thursday the 20th was another Get Out of Town Day (leaving Florence for Bologna), and to start things off, there was another Duomo to be done. Just like in Siena a couple days before, I felt that I needed to experience the local cathedral before I could say I had “done” Florence, so I bounded up early and headed over.

In this case, doing the Duomo meant climbing the dome. It’s among the more famous domes in the world, because at the time it was the biggest one ever built (it may still be, I don’t know). In fact, when it was commissioned, the man who designed it, Brunelleschi, wouldn’t tell the city fathers how he intended to make it stand up. According to legend, when they asked, his response was “If I tell you how I’m going to do it, you’ll just do it yourselves.” And while I can’t really explain how he did it, I do know it’s still there, and for six Euros you can walk up about 500 steps to the top of it.

First, though, you have to participate in a couple of overlapping travel traditions: the incorrect guidebook and the unsigned door. My book said the entrance to the dome is on the south side of the cathedral, so I went there and found a door with only Italian on it – as well as people occasionally coming out, a few going in, and lots of other people like me, holding cameras, looking at the sign with some confusion and frustration on their faces. Then I saw a church employee-type person give a hand signal to someone which translated as “Go around to the other side,” so I decided to try that – and found a line of people under a sign which said, in perfect English, “Entrance to climb the dome.” All very simple, all very common.

The thing about the dome is that, despite all the extra weight I’m carrying these days, the workout wasn’t the problem. What gets me is two things: vertigo from hundreds of steps in a small spiral staircase, and claustrophobia from having to wait in very small spaces. When I can, I’ll put some pictures online, but it can suffice to say that at several points I was in a hallway that was 1.1 Pauls wide, 0.9 Pauls tall, waiting in a long line for something ahead of me to happen which I couldn’t control. There were several moments where I could feel the cold sweats and racing thoughts coming – have to get out, have to get out – and I needed to close my eyes, breathe a few times, and tell myself that nothing bad is going to happen and I’ll get through it soon. In the upper sections, the fun increases when the ceiling becomes sloped, so you can’t quite stand up straight, and then it gets so steep and narrow you have to basically go up a ladder. It’s a party!

On the way up, you get a close-up view of the frescoes inside the dome, and let me tell you, it is some grim stuff. Very few angels or saints up there, but plenty of demons and devils and skeletons and monsters and all kinds of mean, nasty things – people being tortured, getting their heads cut off, the whole thing. Jesus made a couple appearances, as I recall, and some of the portal windows in the dome were painted like they were being held up by angels, but all in all it was a tough scene – and lots of it, like 2,000 square meters, I heard somewhere. Again, it made me think of Lord of the Rings, and my basic belief that Middle Earth means the Middle Ages, and the symbolism of the elves and dwarves and orcs leaving the world to the humans basically means people no longer believing in that stuff and living in a world with less danger and less magic. It was quite clear, looking at these frescoes and many others on the trip, that people in the 13th to 15th Centuries still believed in this stuff. And then some.

Of course, the view at the top of the Dome is out of this world: a sea of red roofs, the hills in the distance, the squares filled with people, and the high comedy of people emerging from this hole in the floor and saying some version of “holy shit” in their native tongue. You work your way around the (fairly small) platform, take all the same pictures everyone else is taking, then climb back into the hole and back into the downward cave. It’s cooler than that, but there is an aspect to it that is “Okay, I’ve done to Duomo, now let’s move on.” And when I came out at the bottom, thanking God for fresh air, I was emerging from the same door where I had started, and the same people (not literally) were standing there with the same looks on their faces, wondering if this is the door to climb the dome.

On the way back to the room, I stopped in a little cafe and got three mini pizzas, a croissant and a bottle of sparking water for three Euro, which is about three and a half bucks, all ordered in Italian: that would be, roughly, Due pizze con proscuitto, uno con solo formaggio, uno croissant, e una botiglia di acqu frizzante. And when I got done with that, something very common happened, something that is sometimes frustrating but often comforting and helpful: The woman responded in English. I guess they figure it’s easier that way, when faced with someone who, to them, sounds like “Jess, I like please doo wit hom, zee one wit only sheeze, and un wott-air wit goss.” A vast majority of the time I bust out my Italian, they respond in English. Sometimes they just look at you and start speaking English!

We had reservations at the Galleria delle Uffizi, which as near as I can tell means “Gallery of the Offices,” because Ufficio means office, and our book said the building was originally made for offices – which raises something else that’s interesting about Italian culture back during the Renaissance: they did nothing small or cheap. They built civic office buildings that are so big and beautiful and filled with art that they become tourist destinations, even though in many cases they’re still the city office building, or library, or what have you.

In the case of the Uffizi, the massive building long ago became one of the world’s great art galleries, on par with the Louvre, the kind of place that your guidebook says requires two days, at least, for the serious art lover. Well, we Geralds aren’t that. We take the opposite tack: Sit down with a guide, run through a description of what’s in each room, make a list of what you want to see, then head out. You almost have to skip the stuff you’re not interested in, so you can survive long enough to see what you want to see. It’s a very male approach – skip the Middle Ages and the Greek shit, I want to see the famous stuff and anything by Raphael – but it does limit a uniquely miserable state called Museum Fatigue: the yawning, the back pain, the sore legs, the headache, all from standing around on hard floors trying to maintain a level of rapture.

So we did the Uffizi. We saw paintings which are so famous that when we saw them we said, “Oh, right, that one!” This would apply to the Venus on a clam shell, the Venus lying down, the Venus in the forest with several other characters, the Venus statue – lots of Veni in the Uffizi – as well some cardinal by Raphael and some self-portraits by Rembrandt. It’s massive and impressive on such a scale that it destroys my will to live. Well, it’s not that powerful, but close, and when you throw in the crowds, we didn’t make it too long. Pretty soon – after some sandwiches and pastries and fizzy water and capuccinni – we were back outside, trying to get a cab to the hotel.

The cab thing is interesting, too. Sometimes they just ... drive by. Sometimes they wave you off, sometimes they don’t. We got one this time by a time-tested method: figure out a common place for people to get out of cabs, then hover, and beat other hoverers to the door. Worked like a charm, and we were soon back at the hotel, ready to face the Dread Road to Bologna.

You might remember from an earlier post – if anybody’s still reading this – that our initial drive from Bologna to Florence was a low point, not only of this trip but of our travel careers in general, and possibly our lives. It took four and a half hours to go 60 miles on a four-lane highway, and at no point did we even know what was going on, other than us sitting still or occasionally driving 10 mph. We had considered a mountain route this time, to avoid the big road, and in retrospect I wish we had done so. We were optimistic, since it was no longer Easter Weekend, it wasn’t rush hour in either city, and it wasn’t night. So we took off, and all was going well until we stopped. This happens occasionally, and nobody seems to think too much of it. In fact, when we tell Italians of our plight on this particular road, their general response is, “Yes, that’s a bad road.” This time we stopped cold for 20 minutes. Just sitting there. And I could see, off on the left, a charming-looking village on a hillside which I knew, from the map, was on the untaken mountain route. It’s bad enough when you’re stuck, but when you can see the other option, it’s that much worse.

And then we started again, and took off at 80 mph, and there was never one single indication of what had caused the stoppage: no construction, no accident, no rockslide, nothing. Just like always. It’s a bad road.

Then the travel gods really got us. One of their favorite tricks to play on foreign drivers is to change the signs ever so subtly, or make them small, or – this is my favorite – have one intersection with your town on a sign, and the next one doesn’t have your town on it. That happens all the time! In this case, it was our written directions saying, basically, go to Bologna, take this exit, get on the tangenziale, which is like a round-the-city highway, take exit 8 (or maybe 9, we weren’t sure about the handwriting) towards Granarolo, and you will find the hotel. I knew that last part was bullshit, but what are ya gonna do? You drive as far as the directions will take you, then ask for more directions.

So we see the first exit, and all seems good. Then we see Exit 2. Then we see Exit 5, but I notice we can’t get to it because there’s a barrier between us and this other highway, the one with the exits and the horrible traffic. Our highway is screaming along, but we can’t get to Exit 2 or 5. No worries, what we need is Exit 8. Maybe 9. Then we see Exit 8, and it says Granarolo – and still there’s the barrier. What’s happening?!?!? Then we see Exit 11, and the barrier. Then Exit 14. Barrier. Then a sign that says “next exit 24 km,” which is like 15 miles! What’s HAPPENING?!?!?!? Then we were clearly leaving Bolgona. Apparently, the key word was tangenziale, a word which (with Poggibonsi) will live in Gerald Family Infamy. And the key moment was when we failed (twice) to get on the tangenziale. We wound up on the Dreaded and Feared A1, which is like the no-exit-forever road to Milan. And we had to 15 miles to an exit – but it turned out to be one of these little rest area/truck stop deals where you can’t turn around. Curse you, travel gods! So we bought some horrible Frito imitations (we’re better at bad food than the Italians), went to the next exit, paid a toll to leave the Dreaded and Feared A1, then pulled a U-turn and got back on the Dreaded and Feared A1, heading back towards Bologna. This time, of course, we saw Exit 9 saying Granarolo, right where it was before, on the other freaking side of the concrete barrier, and this time, of course, we left Bolgona going the other way! Ah, but this time, when I saw an exit that said tangenziale, I pounced, and even though I didn’t know where we were going, we were off the Dreaded and Feared A1 (paid another toll), and eventually on the right road, the one with the exits – and the completely stopped traffic. It was somewhere in here that we started saying things like “Why in hell did our travel agent do this to us,” and “I’m never driving in Europe again,” and “From now on, I’m sticking to cruises.” After possibly a half-hour spent crawling a couple miles, we finally found, and took, Exit 8, Granarolo, and actually saw a sign with the name of our hotel on it. And by the time we got here, we barely cared that the hotel is low-class, isolated, not very friendly, and generally a pain in the ass – all of which I will discuss in my next post. We got some dinner in the restaurant and crashed. Hard.