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We shared the train-station vaporetto ride with a boatload of self-proclaimed Bulgarian tourists. They spoke several languages, and were happily hitting on a Japanese girl who spoke a limited amount of English. They asked her about three different languages (they didn't try Bulgarian), including English, Deutsch, and "Ruski?" The girl spoke enough English to answer questions, and they prattled away merrily while we watched to see if they would try to steal her camera.
The train to Florence was followed by majestic white thunderclouds over the pine green hills of Tuscany. The sky was perfect powder blue, and through Ravenna, Padua, Bologna and on into Florence it was exceedingly beautiful. We walked out almost immediately on arrival, and although it was warm, there was no smog and the sky looked like a Claude Lorrain painting, with the golden light of late afternoon turning all the brown buildings yellow, until the whole city was gleaming. Brunelleschi's famous red dome was glowing from its perch atop the pastel-pink and green duomo.
We saw Michelangelo's David first, which complemented the natural beauty outside with the beauty of the human body. We walked out afterwards to the Piazza Vecchio, where the original David stood until someone threw a piano out of a window in the Medici castle during a riot, breaking David's arm. There was a copy outside the palace marking the spot.
We moved on, across the Ponte Vecchio, which was almost too bright to look at and shooting off glare like a crystal bridge, and up the hill to Michelangelo's old estate, where we watched the sun sink and turn the clouds into glowing embers. The sky turned pink and red and orange, the clouds looked like hot coals that someone was blowing on, and the river turned pink with the sky until the comparison with the river of slime in Ghostbusters was irresistible. We walked down the hill and had a traditional Tuscan dinner of pasta and tomato sauce with plain bread and homemade Chianti.
In the morning, we went to the Uffizi. Saw many famous paintings that Eric recognized from art history, but could say very little about. This included Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus. The museum was arranged in a big "U" shape, with gothic/medieval art on one side and Renaissance and beyond on the other. The Gothic section features, without a doubt, some of the ugliest baby Jesus' in the world. They have full heads of hair, wrinkles, strong manly chins and dour expressions that communicate anything from indigestion to the desire for serious revenge.
After the Uffizi, we tried the market, which had already closed for the day, so Hari bought several linen items from the vendors outside. They had her try them on in tents hanging from the back of their carts (linen because it was hot).
Florence is famous for its leather, and about half the vendors were trying to sell leather jackets. It was at least 90 degrees out, though not too humid. The vendors would say hello to everyone in four or five different languages as people passed by - "Buon giorno, hello, guten morgen, want to buy a leather jacket? Real leather!" Others tried their hand, and wrist, with selling watches, which they mysteriously pulled from a trenchcoat pocket and displayed on their arm.
We took our siesta, then tried the church of Santa Croce and Pitti Palace, but both were closed, so we got gelato (this was a logical course of action). Eric felt like he was getting sick, with runny nose, dry throat and general malaise, so he only got fruit gelato (limon and melone), which was a mistake. When ordering gelato, always, always get chocolate (it's not that the limone wasn't good ... it just wasn't great).
An interesting detour on the way home (looking for a bathroom) led us down another bridge with a nice view of the Ponte Vecchio, then up a very commercial street we hadn't seen before, near the Piazza Reppublica.
We tried the market again in the morning, and were once again stymied, this time because it was Sunday. We were 0/3 in Florence on getting to the market. Went to the Pitti Palace, which was open, but not quite a fair trade for the market. The largest collection of Raphaels in the world turned out to be a big collection of portraits by Raphael of people we hadn't heard of. Or if we had heard of them, we had very little reason to care. Everyone in town was selling postcards of the little angels and "Il Primo Bacio," so we assumed they would be with the rest of the Raphaels, since the concentration of "Bacio" postcards and posters and T-shirts increased to near-critical levels near the Pitti Palace. We were instead led to a glorious room of 16th century pictures of dukes.
And it was not air-conditioned.
After trying the palace gardens, which at $2 were not worth the price of admission (not, at least, when the weather was that ugly out - hot, smoggy, hazy and brown, which matched the gravel walkways and the completely uninteresting tree selection in the garden), we left promptly.
Fortunately, we headed to the train station for tickets out of Florence, where we were allowed to wait in a non-air-conditioned line for roughly an hour while the people in front of us ran back to the hotel because they had forgotten either their passports or their interail documents. During this time, it did not occur to the person behind the window to open another window, or ask the customers to stand aside.
When we had purchased our tickets for every train ride until Paris, we went to the church of Santa Croce, which was open with the tombs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Rossini and Galileo. Tons of other dead people, too, which creeped Hari out. We did, however, see tourist nuns.
