Dateline June 3, 2016, Florence
From Venice the train carried us on to Florence, the city we had most looked forward to, and it did not let us down.
Florence. We came out of the Florence station, let the phone steer us to the flat, and were met by our host Barbara's husband, Maurizio, and their daughter, both wonderful. They walked us through the flat, showed us how everything worked, marked up a map of the city with the spots we should not miss, and handed us a bottle of red. The flat was remarkable, an old rustic shell done over with a modern touch.
Maurizio sent us to the market for lunch, the upper floor full of food stalls, and it was bustling, a great deal like the wonderful market in Budapest.
We took one look at the crowds, decided not to fight them for a table, and had a glass of wine instead. Imagine that.
The Duomo. The next morning we started with coffee at a cafe and made our way to the Duomo, Florence's cathedral, which stands tall over the whole city under Brunelleschi's great Renaissance dome, with the baptistery right across from it.
It is named Santa Maria del Fiore, a vast Gothic church raised on the site of a much older one, Santa Reparata, whose remains are still down in the crypt. We passed on the long climb to the top of the dome, some four hundred stairs, and went inside instead.
High in the dome is Vasari's enormous Last Judgment, finished in 1579, though more of it was painted by his pupil than by Vasari himself.
Piazza della Signoria. Walking toward our afternoon museum reservation, we wandered into a beautiful square without knowing what we had found. The Piazza della Signoria has been the center of Florentine politics for some seven hundred years. It was here that Savonarola lit his Bonfire of the Vanities, and here, in 1498, that he was himself burned after the Inquisition named him a heretic. The square bristles with statues, a copy of the David, a muscular Hercules, a great Neptune fountain, Cosimo high on his horse, each one a piece of Medici message-sending. And in the middle of it all, looking thoroughly out of place, sat a giant bronze turtle with a man on its back.
It was a modern work called "Searching for Utopia," part of a visiting exhibit. We think he is looking for Flagler Beach.
The Accademia. We found a sandwich shop near the gallery to fill the time, a little place that raised all its own animals on a farm, so everything on the plate was wonderful. Then our hour came, and what followed was an experience of a lifetime.
Michelangelo's David. We had no idea it would be that large, or that magnificent, and it is more striking still for the walk up to it, past his unfinished Prisoners that seem to be fighting their way out of the marble.
There is nothing much to say in front of it. You just stand and look.
The Uffizi. Next was the Uffizi, begun by Vasari in 1560 for the Medici, a place he said the artists of the day came to for their work and their pleasure both. We strolled through it, and after the Michelangelos everything looked small by comparison, but there was beautiful work from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, and we lingered longest over two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci.
The Ponte Vecchio. We left the museum and headed across the river toward the Pitti Palace, over the Ponte Vecchio.
The bridge was first built in 996 and rebuilt many times since, and has always been lined with the shops of its merchants. It is said our word bankrupt was born here: when a money-changer could not pay his debts, soldiers broke the bench, the banco, that he traded from, leaving him a banco rotto, a broken counter, and no way to do business. In the war it was the one bridge in Florence the Germans left standing when they pulled out in 1944. We did not go into the Pitti Palace, only stopped for a glass of wine, then walked back over the bridge and, a long day behind us, home to the flat.
That evening we ate at a little local place. We turned up at quarter past six, too early, but the waiter sat us anyway and brought wine while we waited for the kitchen. The food was good and fairly priced, the house wine fine, and every wall was hung with painted copies of famous works, each one signed and dated 2000.
Florence also became our base for several days of trips out into Tuscany, and that is where we will pick up next.
