Florence

     We took a bus from Venice to Florence.  To get to the bus, we had to ride on the vaporetto, the city “bus” system.  It is the boat system that traverses the Great Canal, which is pretty much the heart of Venice.

    There were too many of us (27) to get on the first boat, so those of us who got on the first boat, got off and waited at another “station” where we had to change boats for the rest of the group.  Once on the bus, we made a couple of rest stops and a lunch break at “truck stops” on the interstate.

     A custom strange to us, we had to go select our sandwich or snack or whatever, go back to the cashier, put in our order and pay for it, then go back to the display case, hand over our receipt, and get what we ordered.  Then we had to figure our way out.

      In the convenience stores, you never leave by the same door you came in.  They have oneway turnstiles that let you in, but not out.  To get out, we often had to go downstairs and wander back and forth through aisles of stuff, like going to an Ikea store, where you have to look at everything they have to offer before you can exit.  Our guide explained that process of entry, ordering, paying and exiting, twice in the ten minutes before the bus drew to a stop at the truck stop.  Even with the heads-up, it was still a little bewildering, but we survived and made it back on the bus in time.  

     So we arrived safe and sound in Florence.  The bus driver had to pull over on a busy thoroughfare because the street the hotel was on was too narrow for him to navigate.  It was but a short block downhill with luggage in tow to the hotel courtyard.  This time there was an elevator (no such thing in the Venice hotel).  Our guide gathered all our suitcases near the elevator entrance and ferried them up to the proper floor, where we retrieved them and reported to our assigned room.

      After about 30 minutes to refresh ourselves, we gathered in a very pleasant terrace where we were welcomed with all kinds of beverages, many of them alcoholic and a few snacks.  As we imbibed, our guide gave us a briefing on Florence and some of the things we would see while there.

      Following the session on the terrace, we took a walk downtown to look at the landmarks we would be visiting.  The guide left us with about an hour before we were to meet in front of this giant statue and head to our dinner.  A few of us found a restaurant with outdoor seating (maybe all the restaurants had outdoor seating).  

     We had a little trouble finding seating for the six or eight of us, so a nice young man volunteered to abandon his table to us.  We prevailed on him to just let us join him, rather than drive him off.  It turned out he was from Scotland and the conversation was on.

     When I told him the farther north I got in England, the better I liked it, he glowed.  He was quite interested in Colorado so we pleasantly passed an hour before suppertime.  Before he left, he advised us to climb the hill and visit the fort.

    That night’s supper was a feast.  Every employee in the restaurant seemed a personal friend of Martin, our guide, and they spared nothing to make us welcome and happy.  Some of our number got a little too happy, but getting loud in Italy isn’t a sin.

    The feast was capped off when the main guy (owner? I don’t know) rolled in a big display case full of various desserts.  He took great pride and joy in displaying each dessert and explaining something about each one.  Rod, a fellow tourer, and I got along well, and I stuck close to him because he was diabetic and could turn down dessert without incurring the chef’s wrath.  So I didn’t get scorned too badly when I volunteered to help the Goodwife with whatever dessert she chose.

      At the end of dessert, nothing would do but have an aperitif.  “No thanks” wasn’t an acceptable choice.  The Goodwife and I had a lemon something.  The small swallow I took nearly gave me a heartburn it was so strong. 

     Then we made our way to the hotel.  Florence was a lot easier to navigate than Venice.  I could probably have found my way home without help.  Our hotel was only two or three blocks off the Arno River.

      The next day we toured the Domo, a church with a dome, I guess.  It was reminiscent of the old barn during a blizzard.  It was crowded, warm and stuffy, and noisy.  Our first day in Venice, we were issued a radio on a lanyard with one earbud.  Our guides had a microphone and could broadcast to us wherever we went as long as we didn’t get too strung out.

      We went through the crowded church trying to listen to the local lady guide without steeping on someone or getting stepped on.  By the time we were through, I decided I had seen enough Madonnas with Baby Jesus.  The earlier ones, it was pointed out, had no facial expressions and somewhat unrealistic proportions.  Later ones had various facial expressions displaying joy or dismay or what have you.

      The problem for later painters was what expression to give the child Jesus.  After all, he was God, not man.  As we viewed one picture, the guide told us, he child Jesus sitting on Mary’s lap looked like Winston Churchill.  Well, no cigar, anyway. 

       Later, we would visit the Pitti Palace, built by the Medici family (maybe, not sure).  Every room, and there are a lot of rooms,  is stuffed with so much art you could spend a week there and not begin to cover all the pictures and statuary.  Needless to say, my reservoir for art was saying “Full!  Whoa!  Quit!”  We left there and still had an evening appointment at the Academy where we saw some Michelangelo statues and we got an earful on that guy. 

     He learned anatomy by dissecting corpses, which was strictly against the law, at that time in the hands of the church.  He wasn’t a very nice guy.  He rarely finished anything.  He had underlings who did a lot of work on his “David” statue.  He was human.  We saw David, in all his naked glory.  It was crowded, but nothing like the place we visited that morning.

      Some of the statues we saw were disfigured by having their maleness missing.  One brave soul among us asked what happened to the amputations.  The lady guide somewhat sheepishly said there was a room in the museum filled with genitalia. 

     Other statues had fig leaves.  Not David.  He is there intact.  It didn’t appear to me that David was circumcised.  I wanted to ask about that, but I wasn’t sure I was seeing things correctly, plus I thought one embarrassing question a night was enough.  I refrained. 

      Well, that’s what you get when you turn a clod loose in an art gallery.

      The next day was quite interesting.  We took a short tour of something, outdoors I seem to remember.  We followed that with a fun activity.   We took a cooking class.

      We were divided into teams of four and five with one team of six.  Some of us on each team made dough while others prepared vegetables and still others worked on dessert, tiramisu.  I was on the noodle crew.

      We broke two eggs into a bowl of flour and mixed.  Then we rolled and folded and rolled again.  Out came a little machine that looked for all the world like a miniature washing machine ringer on the old machines before the automatic washers came to be.  The machine had a crank.  We ran the dough through the rollers twice on setting 4.  Then we switched to two (or something like that) and ran the dough through two more times.  By this time, it was getting thinner and thinner and about a yard long.

    Out came an attachment for the hand-cranked roller machine.  This one had blades and a grate like a rotary nut chopper.  It took two of us to hold the skinny dough up and send it through the blades.  Out came noodles.

      Our instructor took our noodles on a tray to the boiler in the back room.  When they came back ten or fifteen minutes later, it was spaghetti, by George.

     Our instructor was quite young and quite voluble.  "Aye yi yi!  What have you done to my spinach!?”  We thought we were supposed to chop it up.  We were NOT to chop it up.  Oh well.

      He was quick to point out our errors, but equally quick to laugh with us, so it was okay.  While we were struggling with the noodles, the tiramisu came along nicely.  Somewhere, one of our subdivisions was working on a sauce.  Spaghetti was our first main course.

      Everywhere we went, the menus all had a first main course and a second main course.  For this meal, the second main course was chicken fried in a tomato sauce.  It wasn’t shake and bake, but I did he-elp.  The chicken was all cut up for us and the oil was in the pan over the burner.  We started the fire and threw in the chicken.  It fried while we worked on the noodles.

     I don’t remember what we put on top of the chicken, tomatoes and green peppers for sure.  The green peppers had been boiled and were soft.  I was supposed to peel the peppers.  The best I could do was strip the meat off the skin, but that didn’t work very well.  No skin and no seeds, I was told.

     When our chef-instructor saw what I had done, he studied it and said, “Very interesting.”  I kept my mouth shut.  When everything was done, we repaired to the basement, which was really a wine cellar with bottles of wine everywhere, like in the catacombs.  There were two big tables were we seated ourselves.  Out came the ubiquitous bottles of wine, and we got set to enjoy the fruit of our labors.

  

      After wine came bread and then the spaghetti.  There were two or three different kinds of sauce, depending on which team had prepared it.  After the spaghetti came course two, the chicken.  It was quite good, I must admit.  We finished up with the tiramisu.

      That afternoon, we followed the advice of our Scot friend and climbed the hill up to a fort.  There was no sidewalk.  We shared the street with scooters and cars.  Fortunately, the traffic was oneway, so we only had to watch or back, and take to the wall when we heard something coming.  The wall was the old city wall that was topped by the fortress.

     We weren’t disappointed.  It was beautiful and quiet, just as our Scot friend advised us.  We wandered around and gazed at the city below.  All three cities we visited had churches everywhere, practically on every block.  Okay, so I exaggerate a little, but still, a lot of churches.

     We got there about 5:30.  At 6 p.m. all BELL broke out.  All of those churches below us had belfries, and at 6 p.m. they all began tolling.  We had fun trying to pinpoint which sound was coming from which church.  It was quite a serenade.

      We had to go back down the big hill.  This time the traffic was coming up towards us, and it was beginning to get dark, but we made it safely down.  The fort didn’t close until 8 p.m.  We wondered about that, but we figured it might be quite pretty to gaze down upon the city lights.  We didn’t find out. 

       After our big midday meal, we weren't very hungry, so we went to a bar where the snacks were free if you bought drinks.  It was one place they didn’t mind if I drank beer instead of wine.  We wandered back towards the hotel.  The Goodwife had a gelato to finish off our meal, and our day.

      We needed our rest.  The next day, we headed for Rome.