Europe 25: Florence, Day 3

It was bound to happen eventually, I suppose.

One of my most firmly held beliefs is that ten percent of humanity isn’t worth the space it takes up on the planet. I’ve never found a group that didn’t apply to. On the other hand, though, nine out of ten isn’t bad odds. Most people are perfectly fine, and I’ve never found a group that didn’t apply to either.

On Sunday morning in Florence, I ran into my ten percent.

The day started pretty well, with a quiet breakfast in the apartment. Our plans were to go to the Duomo – the One True And Required Tourist Attraction in Florence, after all – and from there to see what the day unfolded for us. So we walked over to the tram stop and waited for the T2 to arrive.

Loitering at the side of the platform were four Italian men, probably in their late 20s or early 30s. I remember one of them as being fairly bald for that age. When the tram arrived, they hung back to let people get on and then bum rushed us onto the train. As the door closed I felt someone rip my wallet out of my pocket – a pocket which was buttoned shut – and then the door closed and they took off while we headed out. They got my credit card, my debit card, my drivers license, and a small amount of cash.

We got off at the next stop and walked back to the apartment, though to be honest I was ready to call it a trip and go back to Wisconsin at that point. It’s discouraging when you run into jackals like that.

Because we’d missed a setting on our eSims or some other simple thing that Kim was able to get corrected a couple of days later, we weren’t able to call the credit card company or the bank, but we did email them and send them messages through their various websites. Fortunately, Stacey and JR had working phones and they offered to let me borrow them so we walked over to their apartment. From the time I was robbed to the time we got there and started making calls was a little over an hour, and in that time the jackals had tried to charge vast amounts of money to the credit card – almost all of which was denied, since my usual spending habits did not involve dropping hundreds of dollars at cigar shops and shoe stores, for example – and about a thousand dollars to the debit card, the biggest chunk of which was at a Sephora. What these schmoes needed makeup for is anyone’s guess.

Say what you will about Chase Card Services, but their customer service is excellent. I told them what the last legitimate charge on the card was and they took all of the subsequent charges off our account immediately – the monthly bill was waiting for us when we got home and no fraudulent charges remained on it – and canceled the card. “We’ll send you a new one, but it’s going to go to your home address in the US,” they said, which made sense though it would complicate the rest of the trip. And then they asked, “Do you have this in a Google Wallet or Apple Pay?” I admitted I did, though it wasn’t something I tended to use much. “It will update with the new card information there within the hour.” And twenty minutes later, I had a functioning Apple Pay again.

Dr. Strangebank: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Apple Pay.

I ended using my phone to pay for pretty much everything else I spent money on in Europe. Almost everything in Italy and Portugal – from restaurants and tourist attractions to public transportation and groceries – works with your phone now, and Sweden is entirely cashless at this point. I stand corrected from my earlier dislike of this payment method.

The debit card was a bit trickier. More of the charges had gone through, and since it was the middle of the night back in Wisconsin there wasn’t much they could do for me at that exact moment except cancel the card and send a new one to my home address. I’d have to call back during business hours the next day to speak to a live human in order to dispute the charges, though they promised that I could do that at any time in the next sixty days if that wasn’t convenient.

Spoiler: the debit card situation turned out fine as well.

So it was a dreary morning, made bearable by the comfort of Kim, the kindness of Stacey and JR, and the surprisingly responsive customer service staff of Chase and my bank. Given that, I suppose there was little for me to do but continue on and in the end the whole affair turned out to be a manageable crisis in an otherwise lovely trip.

I have a new drivers license too, now, as it was one of the first orders of business attended to after we got back. It’s very futuristic and has my birth month and year printed in oversized letters in two different, clearly differentiated places in case anyone needs to card me on my next trip to the liquor store. Dude, nothing in this place has aged longer than I have, now let me buy my wine in peace.

We left Stacey and JR’s apartment and headed down to the historic district, stopping at a small café for sandwiches since by this point it was lunchtime. And then we continued on our way to the Duomo.

The Duomo, technically, is just the big dome of a church whose official name is the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore except that everyone calls the whole thing the Duomo and if you ask for the place by its proper name they have to think about it for a bit. It’s kind of like the Blue Route (officially I-476) in Philadelphia that way. We’d gotten tickets that covered the church, the Baptistry, and the museum – all cheek by jowl in the Piazza del Duomo (see what I mean?) so you can get them all together in one easy visit. It’s the one place that pretty much every tourist in Florence has to see, and I have to admit it was kind of underwhelming.

Some of that might have been the shadow cast over the day by our friends the jackals, but I suspect that more of it was due to the fact that the Duomo was mostly empty, largely closed, and mostly though not entirely staffed by people who didn’t have much sympathy or patience with the whole idea of answering questions. It’s the one place I’ve ever been to in Europe where I left feeling genuinely disappointed. It’s gorgeous to look at from the outside and we enjoyed doing that from any number of vantage points during our time there, but the experience of the church itself was kind of empty.

The first thing we came to when we got to the Piazza del Duomo was the Baptistry, however, and it has to be said that this was lovely. It’s an octagonal building and like much of Florence it was under construction when we were there, but a quick internet search reveals that it dates back to the 11th century CE and sits on the site of still older temples. For centuries it was, as the name implies, the place where the infants of Florence would be baptized into the Catholic faith and apparently there’s nothing quite like it in the world.

We’d already seen the gold doors when we walked through the Piazza the first time, but inside artworks and mosaics abounded. Everything about the place was either tiled, covered in mosaics, or decorated. Apparently the ceiling is something to behold but that was being restored and when we looked up we could only see a photo of the original that they’d printed out life-sized and hung above us to conceal the work being done, which I thought was pretty clever of them. Even the floor was interesting to look at. I can definitely recommend the Baptistry.

From the Baptistry we walked across the piazza to the Duomo and got in what appeared to be the line to enter the place, though this was not clear or well indicated. It has to be said that the guy in charge of the line was friendly and helpful and he reassured us and our linemates that we were all in the right place.

Eventually they let us in. We entered through a side door near the back of the nave and found ourselves on the left side of a desk area staffed by two people who watched us come in and told us that we could make a horseshoe around the desk area and go back out again. We weren’t allowed to go into the church any further than that, and the dome itself was out of the question.

They did let us go down to the crypt below the church, and that was interesting though again the woman in charge of the place was not terribly friendly when people would ask her questions. Like many Italian churches, this one sits on top of older versions and if you go below the current level you can see the previous iterations. There were some fascinating tombstones and mosaics, and they led you around the place on pathways that went over and around things so you could get a good look at things. And it was relatively cool, being underground. We enjoyed the crypt as well.

But soon we found ourselves back out on the piazza, wondering what all the fuss was about. That’s when we made our way over to the museum – the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo – and discovered where they’d put all of the things that they’d taken out of the Duomo itself.

It’s impressive right from the get-go.

Pretty much the first space you walk into once you get past the entryway is a giant hall of statues – seriously it’s huge. We spent a lot of time just walking slowly around, looking at the things on display there.

There are statues all throughout the museum, though, and they’re just fascinating. We completed our Ninja Turtle set, with a few statues by Donatello. The first one is in the big hall when you first come in, and the other two are further along the path. The last one, the statue of Mary Magdelene as a penitent, is astonishing. They just didn’t make statues like that when this one was made.

There was also a version of the Pieta from Michelangelo.

You’re not allowed to touch it, of course, but they did put up a modern replica of the top part of it that you can touch so you can get a sense of the statue that way.

In the big room you can also find the original doors to the Baptistry – the ones currently attached to that building are replicas. They’re astonishingly detailed, and much bigger than you think they are when you see them in photos.

There is also an impressive collection of medieval art.

If you go all the way up to the top you can go out onto a rooftop terrace and get a very close-up and nearly eye-level view of the Duomo itself. The sun was both hot and angled directly in the line of sight when we got there so it was hard to get a clear view, but it was quite a sight anyway.

One of the more interesting exhibits had the model façades. At some point the Florentines redid the façade of the Duomo, and when they did that they had a contest to see what design they’d choose for it. Architects submitted wooden mockups of their designs, each about six or seven feet square, and the museum has them all displayed one after the other so you can make your own choices. Or you can just get silly with them because by this point you’ve been immersed in Duomo lore for the better part of an afternoon and even magnificent art like this will get to you after a while.

Eventually we found our way back out into the city. Our thoughts at this point were to go up to the monastery at San Miniato to take in the views of Florence from across the river but we decided that this was a project best left for another day (when we did do that a bit later in the trip we were glad we’d waited) so we found some other thoughts and started making our way over to the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, another church that we were hoping to see. It sits on a giant piazza of its own and we sat there for a bit sharing a bench with a number of German tourists, but the church itself was closed for the day so we decided we’d visit the next day.

We walked back to our apartment, stopping for gelato in the same place we’d been the previous evening where I got my usual lemon gelato and we sat in the deep window wells of the place, out of the sun, enjoying our treats.

After a brief siesta in the apartment we walked over to JR and Stacey’s apartment. They’d offered to make dinner for us, and we had a lovely evening of wine, conversation, cheese and braseola from Lucca, homemade chicken parmigiana, and tennis since the Italian favorite was in the final in what turned out to be an epic match. We spent a very enjoyable evening together, and it was a lovely way to end the day.