Chapter 5: Under The Tuscan Sun
It’s interesting to note that every restaurant, bar, grocery store, train station, and other public space we’ve been in France and Italy so far has played exclusively English-language music. (I’ve heard more Rihanna in three weeks over here than I did in the prior three years in America.) It’s just a bit jarring to be sipping espresso in a quaint Italian cafe to the dulcet voices of the Beastie Boys. Although I do, in fact, love fighting for my right to party.
Our next stop on Sam & Rachel’s Excellent Adventure brings us to Florence (Firenze), the birthplace of the modern Italian language, the Renaissance, and the author who created Pinocchio.
Uh, is it just me or is Pinocchio a pretty weird children’s story? There’s like this wooden puppet who’s kind of an asshole, he gets into all kinds of trouble and for some reason briefly turns into a donkey, and then at the end (in the original story), is hanged on a noose by his enemies. Here’s the very last line of A CHILDREN’S NOVEL:
He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible.
I’m not really sure what the lesson here is for your average six-year-old. Finish your broccoli?
Anyway, the reason we were in Florence on this particular date was to meet my uncle Don and his wife Sheri, a native Kentuckian who moved to Italy when they got married a few years ago. When Rachel and I reached Florence last Tuesday, the four of us had an al fresco dinner together at a local restaurant serving Tuscan food. Right about here in the blog post should be the group photo that we all promised we’d take for my grandmother, but we drank too much wine and forgot, so, I dunno, just use your imagination.
Florence really is a very scenic city. Rachel and I stayed near the Ponte Vecchio, a semi-enclosed bridge crossing the river, lined with shops. You’d be walking along, looking at gold necklaces and gelato flavors and clever t-shirts showcasing Michelangelo’s David‘s penis, and then, bam, you look through the back window of the shop and remember that you’re on a bridge.
We walked around the Florence Cathedral, which was enormously impressive…
…but we didn’t go inside because the lines were long and it was hot outside and my feet hurt and just quite honestly I was more interested in the lemon gelato flavor that I spied in the window of the shop across the street. I mean, on one hand you have a 700-year-old duomo, which is one of Italy’s largest churches and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and on the other hand you have gelato. Eat it quickly before it melts.
If you’re into statues, Florence is your thing. One of my favorites is the Fountain of Neptune.
Apparently some poor artist took 15 years to carve this giant fountain out of brittle Italian marble, and then as soon as it was displayed, people began washing their clothes and inkpots in it, staining the pristine white rock, and then periodically throughout the years vandals would come by and spray paint his face or rip off his trident or break off his hand. Couldn’t they just stick googly eyes on it or something? Shameful.
On a side note, I think one day a year should be designated Fun Day and all the statues and busts in Florence be adorned with googly eyes. I guarantee you that promotion would be a rousing tourist success, and I encourage the visitor’s bureau to set it up posthaste. A few years ago someone actually did this to a Nathanael Greene monument in Savannah, Georgia, whose city government quickly condemned as “no laughing matter”. I heartily disagree:
On Thursday, Don and Sheri and Rachel and I escaped the upper-90s heat of the city to do a bus tour of a few Tuscan wineries.
I guess it’s not too much of a shock for me to tell you that Tuscan wineries are lovely.
The winemakers also walked us through their harvesting and bottling process. Tuscany is well-known for Chianti, one of my favorite types of red wine, and we learned about its different sub-types, including Chianti Classico, Chianti Riserva, and a little-known local delicacy, Mike’s Hard Chianti.
These particular wineries also made their own olive oil and balsamic vinegar, which we drizzled on crusty Italian bread. Italian bread is notoriously, let’s say, not great. Historically, they didn’t use salt in their bread, because salt used to be very expensive. But guys, now salt costs like 30 cents a ton. Come on. If France can do it, so can you.
On Friday, Rachel and I went to the Uffizi Gallery, one of the first modern museums and the recipient of a huge number of priceless Renaissance pieces during the fall of the House of Medici. These include works by Botticelli, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Rembrandt. It’s an altogether enormous and impressive collection, although by the end of it you’re just kinda rushing through gilded room after gilded room in a punch-drunk stupor. Cool, there’s another 1,000 year old statue, ok awesome, there’s another 25 priceless religious artifacts, that’s great, I could really use a salami plate and some pecorino cheese right about now.
The next day, our last in the city, Rachel and I did a guided street food tour of Florence. We turned out to be the only people booked for that time slot, so for the next 2.5 hours we had a chef walk us through the street markets and local restaurants of the town, showing us how Florentines lived and ate day-to-day. We had local salami, prosciutto, sheep’s cheese, fruits, duck ragu, braised beef, cow stomach (not bad actually), bruschetta, prosecco, white wine, and gelato.
In retrospect, as I’m typing this, yes, most of our time on Florence was spent eating and drinking, or recovering thereof.
So…success?
