Europe 25: Florence, Day 4, part the first

This post got sufficiently long that I had to break it into two parts. I’m never sure who reads these – it takes a dedicated reader to follow along with someone else’s vacation after all – but mostly I just want to write these stories down so I don’t forget them. If you’re still here, thank you! I appreciate it.

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There’s a scene in the movie version of The World According To Garp that might or might not be in the book (I can’t remember) where Garp and his new wife are house-hunting. They’ve just been through a charming little house and they’re standing outside of it talking with the realtor when they hear the unmistakable sound of a sputtering engine. They look up in time to see a light plane crash into the second floor of the house. There’s a moment of silence, and then the pilot climbs out, waves, and announces that he’s fine. Garp looks at the realtor and says, “We’ll take it.” His wife is incredulous – how could they buy this house when it just got hit by a plane? “It’s pre-disastered,” he explains. “What are the odds of that ever happening again?”

So that was how Monday felt, as we headed off to pick up the T2 tram at our local station. And in fairness to Florence, we never did see the jackals again. I guess it was just my bad luck to have crossed paths with them in the first place.

I generally love trams, buses, trains, and public transportation of every kind. You get to know a place that way, in a way you don’t when you’re in a car. We got on the tram and headed down to the big piazza by Santa Maria Novella, because that’s where the carabinieri station was and I needed to file a report for insurance purposes. Not for law enforcement purposes, it has to be said – the Florentine carabinieri do absolutely nothing about pickpockets and the like, even when they know who the pickpockets are. It says so, in English, right on the report. This is, in fact, just about the only thing on the report that isn’t in Italian. But sometimes you need to have documentation because people will ask for it before doing anything. In the end nobody did, but it’s best to be sure and we weren’t going to go back to Florence just to get the report so we needed to do that at the time. We’d tried to file a report at a different carabinieri station that we passed by in our travels on Sunday, but they simply shrugged and told us to go to the one by Santa Maria Novella when it was open on Monday.

We got there and then stood in a short but very slow-moving line. Italian civil servants are not known for speed, and the officer behind the bullet-proof glass window would often spend fifteen minutes or more doing paperwork between each person he spoke with, so we got to know some of the people on our side of the glass pretty well. A carabinieri station where you can file reports such as ours is one of the saddest places in Florence, and after a while I started to think that perhaps I’d gotten off lightly after all. There was a young Chinese woman, for example, who was there her friend who was helping her through the process – also Chinese, but with more familiarity with Florence. She’d had her entire bag stolen, including her wallet and her passport, and was supposed to be on a flight back to China the following day. A woman from New York City also had her wallet stolen but had no backup methods of payment the way my Apple Pay was working for me. She’d been in Florence for weeks and was headed home soon, and was trying to figure out how it would all work. There was a Dutch woman whose bag was taken from between her and her husband while they sat on some stairs. She didn’t need a passport to go home, though, and in the end she couldn’t wait for the officer to get to her so she left. Apparently you can file these reports at the airport as well and she said she'd try her luck there. There were others as well.

I got to the front of the line and the officer handed me a form to fill out, though he refused to give me anything to fill it out with. Fortunately the Chinese woman had just finished using the communal pen and was happy to let me have it. In the end I filled out the form incorrectly – I answered Question A in the slot for Question B and vice verse – but when I finally got to the front of the line again the officer looked at it, shrugged, and completed the report anyway. What did it matter? It was going to die unread in a folder anyway and now I had my documentation.

We said goodbye to our new companions, wished them well, and headed off for Santa Maria Novella.

The Basilica di Santa Maria Novella is hands-down the best church in Florence if you are planning to visit as a tourist. It was everything I was hoping the Duomo would be and more, and if you find yourself in Florence with time enough to go to only one medieval or Renaissance church site, this is definitely the one you should visit. I am not being paid for this endorsement. They’re welcome to do so if they want, but I suspect they have no need for that kind of thing. It’s a great site.

Not bad for a place that we got into through the wrong door.

We didn’t actually mean to do that, but as we walked across the piazza to Santa Maria Novella we saw the sign that said Entrance and just headed that way. There was no line. The people working there just said to come on in so we bought our tickets and went through. Eventually we noticed that the line at the door on the other side of the complex was fairly long, and we were glad to have skipped it. I’m not sure what the difference is between the two doors – they’re both accessible for those with disabilities, and they’re both clearly labeled – but for some reason most people go in the other one. Perhaps because it is a clearer path toward the nave.

This meant that we saw the place in a fairly nonstandard order, but it worked out pretty well for us.

The first place we found ourselves was called The Cloister of the Dead, mostly because it had in fact been used as a cemetery for a long time and, well, it’s a cloister with a lot of dead people in it. Stands to reason. That said, it’s really astonishing to see. Pretty much every available surface – walls, floors, even the ceiling – is covered with some artwork or memorial, and you can spend a lot of time just wandering around in it.

The Cloister of the Dead opens out to a fairly large interior courtyard known as the Green Cloister, and you can walk all around it enjoying the view.

One of the things that branches off from the Green Cloister is the Spanish Chapel, which is just astonishingly gorgeous. It’s covered in frescoes from top to bottom, but otherwise it’s just an open space where you can walk around and get close up to things or step back for a more inclusive view. And on the floor you have more to see as well. We spent a fair amount of time in this room just soaking it in.

From there we walked back toward the church itself, but right before the doorway into the nave we found a Tree of Life frescoed onto the wall. It’s kind of damaged, but some of that is probably because of the periodic floods that happen in Florence. They mark the high water line on the wall for those who are interested, and we were pretty impressed.

The actual Basilica of Santa Maria di Fiore is a lovely thing if you enjoy medieval and Renaissance churches, which both Kim and I most assuredly do. It’s bright and airy the way these churches were meant to be – much of the “dark Gothic” edgelord interpretation comes from years of candle soot on the stone, for example – and it was stuffed full of frescoes, statues, stonework, and carved wood. You walk in and immediately the structure of the place leaps out at you.

These are all over the floor.

There’s just so much stuff in here that at times it seems like they were at a bit of a loss as to where to put it all. “Just attach it to the wall with the rest of it!” Although it’s pretty nice stuff when you look closely at it.

You can even go behind the altar if you want, and if you do you will find some really fascinating medieval woodwork.

Along the side walls there are chapels, each one decorated with more frescoes, paintings, and stained glass than the next.

And there’s random art pretty much everywhere, not all of it dating back to the medieval period.

This guy is also in the running to be my next social media profile picture.

And they have the world’s most gorgeous gift shop, should you wish to support the church and come home with trinkets in the process.

We left the church and headed over to the Great Cloister, which is about the size of the church itself.

The whole thing is lined with artwork.

We walked around the entire circumference of the Great Cloister, which is how we discovered what turned out to be the back door to the pharmacy. Santa Maria Novella has a long medical tradition behind it, and it still has a pharmacy of its own. You can’t get there from the Great Cloister, though, which is why the people inside the pharmacy door just ignored me when I tried to get their attention.

To get to the pharmacy you have to exit the church complex, turn left down the block, turn left again, and walk until you see the front doors to the pharmacy, which are clearly marked by both the labeling on the doors and the crowd standing in line to get in.

They only let a certain number of people into the pharmacy at a time, which you understand when you get inside because it’s not that big and there’s a lot of fragile stuff there. They don’t do medicines anymore. Mostly it’s a place where you get perfumes – you can design your own, if you are so inclined – and soaps, lotions, and other such products.

It never hurts to look up when you’re in Italy. You never know what you might see.

Eventually they let us in, and we had a fine time just kind of taking it all in. It kind of make the corner Walgreens look a bit proletarian, but you know that’s more my speed anyway. I spent most of my time there trying not to break anything. Kim enjoyed the perfume section, though.

By this point it was lunchtime and we found a little sandwich shop nearby. Our goal, however, was to walk over to another church – the Basilica di Santa Croce.

And this has gotten long, so I will continue it in a second post. What can I say? It was quite a day.