One big update

Hi all, the Internet cafe is jammed tonight and I'm on the slowest computer. Therefore, I'm going to just send this in one big posting and forego the pictures until I get to Venice and try again there. See the individual headings for times and locations! Leaving Florence tomorrow, so except for dinner tonight, this brings everyone up to date!

Because this is all one entry, you can read straight through, top to bottom. It was written in chronological order.

Bella Firenze

Feeling MUCH better after kicking ass and taking names, I led Mom, from memory, directly to our B&B on the Via Roma, and it even took my breath away. Large, wooden double doors open into a simple marble entry way that belies fully and finely restored apartments of Il Salotto di Firenze. Alessandro is only 31 years old, and although he doesn’t own the apartment, he started the B&B which occupies it several years ago and has been wildly successful ever since. For obvious reasons.

The main door opens onto a long hallway off of which three guest rooms over look the Via Roma with a small reception office at one end. Just before the office on the left is the entrance to the breakfast/common room which functions as combined travel library, dining room and kitchenette. On the far side of the dining room are three additional rooms in a hallway identical to ours. Our balcony over looks one of the fanciest shopping streets in Florence and the well-heeled and not-so-well-heeled traffic parades up and down all day and night. Mom sits outside, even in her nightgown, smoking at all hours.

We walked around the old city, stopping to admire Il Duomo and the Battistero, Palazzo Vecchio, and Santa Croce before stopping for a light lunch of various bruschetti then buying tickets at the tobacco shop and catching the number 13 bus up to the Piazzale Michelangelo where I finally got to see the city from the far side of the river. This was a perspective I had only admired in pictures, so I was delighted to see it from above.

Back in the heaven that is iSdF, I sat on the balcony while Mom slept, then showered and dressed up for the first time since Pompeii and took her to Ristorante Accademia, the little out of the way place Heidi and I had enjoyed so much when we were here with Daddy and Mary. The food and menu was the same, but the quiet, dark, local atmosphere of the place has been replaced by a large touristy crowd (probably because of its proximity to the Galleria dell’Accademia and its statue of David). This may be because we were here in January 2006, but somewhere, I’m convinced, the restaurant must have been listed in a guidebook which says it caters to groups and families. There were three large tables of American families, two of which had young children, but the food was exactly as I remembered it and we both had spectacular meals and wine.

Key fiasco

Because I had misunderstood the key situation (or forgotten, or just had my head up my butt), I had only taken one set of keys with us to the restaurant--the inside set that allows us to enter the B&B and our room, not the set that allows us to enter the building from the street. As a result, we had to figure out a way to call Alessandro to let us into the building--he lives off site. His emergency cell phone number is printed on the key card we have for the upstairs rooms, but the phone booth around the corner only takes phone cards and all of the tobacco shops that sell phone cards were closed. The time was close to 10:30 PM, Mom’s feet hurt, and we were both exhausted (but looked good!).

Thankfully, the second person we stopped on the street (it’s a busy street until very late at night) spoke English AND had a cell phone, so she called Alessandro for us. He was still out having dinner with his father, but said he would come let us in. We walked around the Piazza della Repubblica, took photos of the carousel, and window shopped for a while, then found a bench within eyeshot of the B&B and waited. About 30 minutes after we called, other iSdF guests, a Belgian couple, came by and we went upstairs with them, using our own keys to get into our room. Now how to let Alessandro know that we were in so he didn’t have to end his evening early?

I tried and tried and tried to figure out how to use the phone in our room, but I couldn’t figure out which combination of numbers I could leave off (the country code) and which numbers I needed to dial (the city code) before the actual number itself. I hadn’t watch the girl dial the phone before, so I had no way of knowing! We waited on the balcony and, apologizing profusely, hollered down to Alessandro when he came around the corner with his motorcycle helmet and messenger bag. He was extremely gracious and just glad we had made it inside okay.

Lucca and Pisa

We slept late on Friday morning and were the last ones in the dining room at 9 AM. This gave us an opportunity to apologize again to Alessandro and pick his brain about how we might best get to Lucca for the day. He printed out the train schedule from the Internet and we were on our way. He is so accommodating; his mother even made a sweet pound cake for the breakfast bar.

When we changed trains in Pisa for Lucca, we decided that if we had time to return to Pisa later in the day, we would. We disembarked the train in Lucca at about 1:30 PM and walked from the train station into the old city. Immediately, we fell in love with the place.

From our guide book: “Despite incessant wars with Pisa and Florence during the Middle Ages, the town has always been prosperous, a happy situation reflected by its splendid buildings. In 1805, Napolean gave it to his sister as a principality, and in 1847, it was incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.”

We met a woman on the train who spoke no English, but we communicated as best we could with each other. She asked us where in Italy we had been, and when we said Pompeii, she indicated that lives near there and was on her way to see her daughter in Viareggio. We said words and made hand gestures like Coliseum, New York, Empire State Building, next year, last year, children, travel, flying, etc., but most of the time Mom and I had no idea what she was saying, or what she thought we were saying. It was great! When we took her picture with Headi, she gave us her mailing address to send her a copy of the picture. I think she thought we were nuts.

In Lucca, we briefly watched workmen construct an outdoor stage for the Lucca Music Festival which runs throughout the summer. Last week was Sheryl Crow and next week is Ennio Morricone. Too bad we couldn’t stay for Saturday’s show, but we didn’t know this week’s musician (an Italian) anyway.

We saw the Volto Santo, or Holy Face, in the Cathedral of St. Martin, which is a wooden effigy of Christ on the cross famed for the legend of its journey to Lucca, then tried in vain for about 30 minutes to find the Guinigi Tower, a 14th century palace tower topped with fully grown trees. Of course, we had passed its subtly-marked entrance twice and were only able to orient ourselves to it when we caught a glimpse of it at the end of an alley. Mom sat at the bottom while I climbed the steep and slightly scary stairs. The view of the ancient, walled city was an island of terra cotta roof tops surrounded by an ocean of green rolling hills. I met a lovely older couple fro London on top who offered to take my picture with Headi. They got a HUGE kick out of her.
We had lunch inside the walls of the Roman Amphitheater, which is now the town “square,” but really a circle because of the shape of the theater. I had a grilled vegetable pannini and Mom had her first pizza of the trip. Spoiling ourselves, we each ended our meal with a gelato sundae. She had vanilla gelato with Nutella and whipped cream; I had Amaretto gelato with whipped cream and pirouette cookies. I love the pirouette cookie.

On the way back to the train station, we walked the old walls which overlooked the lush statue gardens of Palazzo Pfanner, the 17th-century villa own by the Austrian who introduced beer to Italy.

Although it was already late in the day, about 5:15 PM, we decided to get off the train in Pisa and go to the tower. It would have been silly to have been so close but not to have made the effort. Instead of walking, which would have killed us, we took an eight euro taxi through the highly congested streets of this bustling little city (not like Lucca at all) and saved ourselves the 2-2.5 mile walk.

Like every other tourist there, we struggled for too long trying to line each other up with the tower in order to make it look like we were somehow holding it up. Easiest, of course, was Headi. She’s just so accommodating, and always takes a wonderful picture too!

Now she has money coming out the wazoo

Florence, Il Salotto di Firenze, Saturday, July 12, 2008, 6:45 PM

The wind is gone. No more train problems. Mom and I are both eating much healthier in Tuscany: more fresh fruit and vegetables, fewer unhealthy carbs, still lots of wine though. Just an update for those who want to know. And I know there are a few of you who do. ;)

Anyhoo…

At one point early last evening, she stretched out in her nightgown on the bed where I had left some euro coins. Unknown to her, they stuck to her thighs, so when she stood up, money slowly started falling from underneath her nightgown to the floor. She had no idea where they were coming from and looked utterly baffled but kind of delighted at the same time. I cracked up, as I am wont to do, and was barely able to chide, “The farting has stopped, but now you have money coming out the wazoo!” We’ve been breaking into side-splitting laughter about that one all day.

San Gimignano

We rose early today, our last full day in Florence, in order to do a few things we had been meaning to do, but hadn’t yet done. We strolled down to the Arno after breakfast and, before all of the vendors had opened, took pictures of the rowing skulls on the river and of the Ponte Vecchio bridge itself. We returned via the Uffizi courtyard taking pictures of the Piazza della Signoria and the Neptune Fountain. On our way back through the old city to the bus station, we walked, drooling, through the Mercato, to the leather district where vendors hawked their decadent smelling belts, coats and purses. We scouted out the items we wanted buy on our way back, noting the location of each stall and the time he or she closed.

After some effort, I found the SITA bus station (Mom waited at the train station and I fetched her when I found it) and we boarded the first of two busses for San Gimignano. We had a brief pause in our journey and changed at Poggibonsi for the remaining 11 km up to the walled city.

S.G. and its 14 towers sit high on a hill surrounded by it ancient walls and might be best known in the States as the setting of the women’s prison in Tea with Mussolini. We had lunch first, at Bel Songgiorno, a restaurant that on three walls is still the old stone, but has all glass on the fourth wall, offering picturesque views of the rolling hills surrounding S.G.

Because we only had 2 hours before our return bus (we wanted to be sure we actually had time to buy things once we got back to Florence), Mom and I split up. She went to the grim Museum of Torture which displays all sorts of horrible little (and large) devices of pain and death that have been used from medieval times all the way, they say, up to today, in Iraq.

I climbed the Torre Grossa, the Big Tower, which has been part of the town hall since the 13th century. Dante argued the case for S.G.’s alliance with Tuscany in its lower chambers in 1300. What amazed me about the frescoes on the courtroom walls was that almost every scene had a dos in it. Sometimes several dogs and several breeds. The Italians love their dogs. An unrelated tidbit of information is that a medieval ordinance in S.G. forbid any other structures in the city from being built higher than this tower. Today, it is the only one open to the public.

I’ll give you 10 euro for that

We made it back to Florence with time to spare and shopped our way back to the center of the city. We each bought little gift items for friends and family and a purse for ourselves. The vendor from whom I bought my bag loved my Obama pin, so I offered it to him if he knocked even more money off the price. It saved me three euro, or about five dollars.