Firenze

June 28 Well, Cortona is still cutesy and touristed and beautiful. We happen to be staying in the exact same room I was in before, so that’s handy in this re-built convent with a winding warren of hallways and stairs. We didn’t quite know how to act when we first got here – we have a room to ourselves? With towels and our own bathroom? We can come back anytime we want? It’s a nice break from hostelling. Yesterday we spent the morning on the train from Rome. Dad and Karen stared out the window and I finished a book. In the afternoon we trekked out to Le Celle (St. Francis’ cell) and Santa Margherita Church. It was really pretty out and not too hot, but last night (once we were all snuggled up in our beds) a thunderstorm broke out, and boy did it rain. This morning it’s clear and sunny again. We’re going to go visit the museums today if we can convince ourselves to leave our room. June 30 Our last day in Cortona had another thunderstorm in for us. Luckily, this time we had to good fortune to combine shelter with lunch at a nice little restaurant with gluten-free options for Karen. She had tomato soup, Dad had spaghetti, and I had a 4 fromaggio pizza. We scuttled home in the drizzle afterwards. Karen and I laughed at Dad, who simply galloped down the hills to get to our nice dry room. When motivated, that man can move. For dinner we returned to the same restaurant for the gluten-free goodies and friendly waiters. They remembered us. In Italy meals begin with antipasti (appetizers), continue with prima pasti (first pasta), and then secondi (second course), followed by dessert. All this adds up, of course. The night before Dad needed some dinner, and I kept him company, so I got some caprese (mozzarella sliced with tomato and fresh basil) to pretend to eat and he got a prima pasti ravioli with sage and butter sauce. The waitress asked if that was all with a face that clearly said she thought we were starving to death. We did a little better this night, Dad got a soup before his calzone, and I had gnocchi before some pork. Karen dined well on veal with mushrooms and a side of zucchini. No one worried if we were going to starve there, but we were a little worried about being able to waddle home. As Dad keeps noticing, Italy is no place for a heart patient. Everyone here walks, uphill and down, over cobbles and lots of stairs. Being handicapped here would be a huge challenge – smooth surfaces are hard to come by. We loaded up on our hotel’s free continental breakfast before taking off on the train for Florence. Dad still seems dismayed over Italians’ lack of appreciation for bacon and eggs, but he’s managing with only a little comment every now and then. We made it into Florence a couple hours later, since the bus was blessedly on time in Cortona. A nice little old man helped us despite a lack of English, and we found another helpful friend on the Florence bus. We cut it a little close, since I had reserved tickets for the Uffizi gallery at 1:30, and we didn’t get out of our out-of-the-way-hostel until 1. We did make it more or less on time though, and we spent the afternoon soaking up paintings by Botticelli, Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, Cimabue, and others. Karen gave each work a lot of attention, so we spent about 3 hours in there instead of the average 2. Karen just seems to soak everything in without saying much, and my Dad isn’t too chatty, so sometimes I have a hard time knowing if they like what they’re seeing. They haven’t revolted or gone into protest yet, so that’s a good sign. The Uffizi had so many works from the same period that we could start to see the difference between the masters and forgettable names – it’s not just prejudice, there really is a difference between the good and the mediocre. Maslow’s hierarchy had been put to the test for me: art or lunch. For three hours art won, but by the time we left I was pretty desperate for dinner. We walked across Ponte Vecchio, a neat old bridge covered in gold shops by the Medici to find a restaurant from our guidebook. The entire center of the bridge had been blocked off for a huge wedding of some kind. I don’t know who they were or what they did, but those people had money and wanted to show off. We filed past on the sidewalk with all the other tourists, gawking at the photographers and wineglasses and the couple. They may have been wealthy and important, but I would never want to get married that way. How showy, how shallow. They were on display like something in the shop windows, and had to have police nearby to help with the crowds. Not much fun. We saw a few other newly weds that night, walking around to all the big sights to perform the litany of the photos. That might be more fun. For dinner, Dad and I devoured calzones while Karen had grilled pork with salad and potatoes. We left satisfied and exhausted for our hostel. We’re staying in a convent-turned-hostel, with something like 300 rooms. We have our own private little room with 3 beds and a tiny bathroom, so we are quite content. We’ve found that we can walk here pretty easily since Florence is rather small. Plus, all the Tobacchi shops are out of bus tickets (as they come in on Monday), so it’s just been easier overall not to worry about schedules and routes and walk. Tomorrow we might go joyriding on one of the little electric buses, but other than that, we’ve got our daily exercise laid out for us. Florence is very different than Rome; I think I prefer Rome. Florence is a lot smaller, so it’s handy to be able to get from one side of the city to the other in almost no time (we can walk from our hostel to the other side of town in an hour – Rome took more like 4 hours). It’s also more consistent in that all the buildings and piazzas are clearly Renaissance instead of being a mishmash of 1000 years. That said, Rome is big enough to absorb the tourist crowds and still be its own city; Florence’s roads are literally crawling with tourists and little else. The scam artists have followed, of course, so Rome’s not alone in that problem. The many museums have some great art, but the reason they have it is that they have gutted all the nearby churches. In Rome you can still walk into chapels and find Caravaggios; in the Academia there’s rooms full of altarpieces from Florence, which means a lot of naked altars. It’s nice to be able to get up close to them, but I think seeing the art in situ is more powerful. This morning we hit the Academia early and spent 3 hours looking at more medieval art and Michelangelo’s David. Even though people spend hours in line, most of them just run through to David and then glance at a few other things and leave. It’s not a terribly big museum, but it has some nice things in there. Afterwards we took a picnic across the river (we got shooed away from the Cathedral. I guess picnicking on national monuments doesn’t go over well) in a little park. Tonight we’re going to try out our hostel’s buffet dinner, it sounds like there’ll be a few things Karen can eat too. Plus she’s got tuna and some other things with her that she can eat. (She’s never going to want to see a can of tuna again when she gets home, I’m guessing). She’s a trooper. She worries about whether she’s putting us to trouble with her dietary needs, I worry whether Dad and Karen like anything, and Dad tries to get the two of us to calm down. We’re all getting better at our respective jobs.Dad is also navigating for us now, plus doing some reading to help us figure out what to do. I'm grateful. I have just convinced Karen to try to eat a raw onion with a raw tomato. We don't have any silverware, and Dad is out at a laundromat. Now she is making weird faces and her nose is running. I'm going to try to help her finish it off. If you never hear of us again, you know what happened to us. Death by onion.