Florence Part One

Our hostel room in Il Ghiro

Tuesday morning Pat and I took the short train from Rome to Florence.  The weather was regrettably grey and rainy - I had hoped to have stunning views of rolling Tuscan hills bathed in sunshine, but instead we had primarily views of fog.  I'm sure underneath the fog there was some romantic Tuscan landscape, but we didn't get to see any of it.

I think I had decided I would like Florence even before I got there.  It's roughly the same size as Salzburg, and with a similar history of wealth.  Where Rome had the rich history mixed in with a more run-down present, Florence seemed like it would have well-preserved cultural, historical and artistic heritage through and through.  In a way, that was very true.  Florence is stunning; it's history and art are present around every turn, and everything was maintained...except it seemed like we had a lot of encounters with tourists and very few encounters with "real" Florentines.  Perhaps it was the time of year, but everything seemed tourist-oriented, and it seemed to lack the underlying hum of locals going about their daily business.  Maybe we were looking in the wrong places.

Regardless, despite the rain and extreme tourist presence, I liked Florence immediately. Our hostel was a short distance from the train station, so we walked.  It was hard to tell where it was from the street.  There was nothing to distinguish it but a little sign next to the door - which, after Budapest, made my heart sink a little.  But the hostel was lovely.  It was on the top floor of a residential building with a small kitchen and common area and only a few rooms.  Our room was clean and bright, and came with a bidet (which I didn't use, but Pat tried to use to wash his feet).  The best part, though, was the guy who ran the hostel.  He was somewhere between 30 and 40 and was someone my dad would describe as 'squirly'.  He rushed around everywhere, making sure we were settled, making sure we had coffee and internet and anything else we wanted.  I think he might have had one too many cappuccinos.

Our hostel guy recommended a place for us to eat lunch, which of course I forgot to write down and therefore cannot remember what it was called, but it was delicious.  Probably the most genuine Tuscan food we had the entire trip.  We ate a little of everything, including some very scary looking squidlets covered in an olive oil sauce.  Then we explored Florence, starting with the leather markets and heading toward the Duomo.  Again, I wish I had a picture of Pat's face upon first seeing the Duomo.  Florence is so small and the Duomo is so big that it didn't really surprise us the way the Colosseum did, but Pat's jaw still dropped when he saw it.  After that we found the Uffizi (the big art gallery) and Pat got incredibly frustrated with me as I went into every Florentine paper store we passed.  Then we went into the Duomo and climbed the tall tower next to the Duomo.  I got some cool pictures before it started to rain again.  The weather couldn't decide what it wanted to do, so we crossed the river over the Ponte Vecchio - the bridge lined with shops - and emerged onto a small street with no shelter just as the sky opened up and let out oceans of rain.  Our umbrellas were practically useless against the waterfalls coming off the roofs of the buildings, and of course we were in a part of town that had very little in terms of shelter.  Pat's poor tennis shoes were soaked all the way through and squished when he walked, which didn't really mater as he walked through the rivers that used to be sidewalks.  We finally took shelter in a little Irish bar owned by a Chinese family (seriously) until the rain let up a little.  Then we walked back to the hostel, changed out of our soaked clothing, and went out for dinner at a pizza place.  Finally, we ended the night by climbing up to the Piazza Michelangelo, which has a stunning view of the city, and called Mom to wish her happy birthday while staring at the Florence skyline.  On our way home we walked through what looked to be the clubbing district, which was full of Americans on study abroad programs.  We looked for the cast of Jersey Shore, who were filming in Florence at the time, but didn't look very hard and had no luck finding them.  Oh well, maybe next time.

Bidet. Which Pat used to wash his feet

View from the hostel room

View from the hostel room

Duomo

Masks

Pat with the little squidlet

Squidlets

Pattycakes and the Duomo

The Gates of Paradise

David replica in the square

Trying to lift the lock chain

Ponte Vecchio

Pat at the (almost) top of the tower

Pat at the top in the rain

View of Florence from the top of the tower next to the Duomo

Florence skyline

The Vatican

Surprise parade we stumbled upon

After our tour of the Colosseum and Palatine Hill, we booked another tour for two days later of the Vatican with the same guide.  It was a good decision, too, because even though we arrived early in the morning, the line was already around several blocks outside of the Vatican.  With our tour, we got to jump that mess and avoid all of the peddlers who harass the people standing in line, too.  It was also nice to get more information that the plaques or Pat could tell me about the works of art in the museum.

Our tour took us through the vast art collection in the Vatican museum, which includes the Sistine Chapel.  To be honest, the Sistine Chapel was too crowded with too many people shouting "NO PICTURES" for me to really enjoy it.  Even so, it's clearly an amazing piece of work.  Pat also had plenty to share about the sculptures we passed along the way.  Some of the more disconcerting statues had realistic eyes.  I guess many roman statues were originally painted to be lifelike, which is hard for me to wrap my mind around since I can only ever envision them as white marble.

After going through the museum twice - once with the tour and once by ourselves to spend more time looking at specific works of art - we took a break to eat horrible pizza in the museum restaurant and write some postcards to send from the Vatican.  Then we found the entrance to St. Peter's, which is not attached to the museum, and explored there.  A student of mine had told me that the views from the top of St. Peter's were stunning, so part of our tour of St. Peter's was the very narrow staircase to the top, followed by gorgeous views.

That night, to wrap up our tour of Rome, we had dinner near the Spanish Steps.  Dinner was a fabulous mix of pastas (naturally), and dessert was gelato on the Spanish Steps.  The cherry on top, though, was our favorite pastime: watching the hoards of guys attempting to sell stuff illegally.  The guys would swarm the square for about five minutes, until the police (one of whom was wearing heels) would walk through.  Then the guys would run as quickly as possible around a corner until the cops were out of sight, when they would return to do it all over again.  We determined that they must have some kind of signal.  There was a guy doing laser pointer patterns on a building that we're certain was sending messages to his gang, and we also decided that the lone man who shot some kind of blinky-twirly thing up into the air was a watchdog of some sort.  As exciting as watching these games was, we got a little frustrated with how many times they asked us to buy things.  Pat actually got upset at one particularly aggressive rose seller, and told him to get out of my face. 

All in all, I'd say it was a very successful trip.  From the Vatican to delicious food, from the Colosseum to Horny Moses, I'd say we covered a lot of ground in very little time.  We left Rome feeling like we'd conquered the city, and headed to Florence via a rainy train ride, to experience beautiful Tuscan countryside, the leather markets, and Brunelleschi's gorgeous dome.

The ugliest statue of the Pope in the entire world

Giant bronze Roman statue.  It was buried upside down when it was found

Very sneaky photo in the Sistene Chapel

Illegal photo

More illegal photos

Scary eyes

Illegal Pat photo

More scary eyes

I pretended to blend in with the statues.  It didn't work so well.

We went back twice to see this

They look exactly alike, don't you think?

The double helix

The top of St. Peter's

Me at the top of St. Peter's

Lookin a little sweaty there, Pat

Pat got on the ground to try and take some cool pictures, but then my camera was malfunctioning so I tried to fix it by taking pictures of him...against his will.

The tiny way up/down in St. Peters. 

Spanish Steps

On our way to Florence