Europe 25: Florence, Day 4, part the second

After leaving Santa Maria Novella for the café we finished off our sandwiches and headed off toward the Basilica di Santa Croce, and eventually we found it right where the GPS said it would be. We also found a few other things along the way, though.

Not long into our walk we came across a Stumbling Stone. We first discovered these in Rome, and they’re all over Europe now. They’re little brass plaques embedded in the sidewalk in front of houses where victims of the Holocaust once lived. They give the name of the victim, their date of birth, and what happened to them – in this case, Angela Todesco Benedetti, who was deported to Auschwitz and then murdered (“assassinata” – a much more accurate description than simply “died” or even “killed”) on February 29, 1944. If there was a family living at one of these houses, each individual member would get their own stone.

These stones serve to remind us of where the racism and violence inherent in Fascism inevitably lead, as we see it rampaging through the United States these days. The proper moral response to that kind of undiluted evil is crystal clear. “You don’t fight Fascists because you’re guaranteed to win,” said John Cusack. “You fight Fascists because they are Fascists, and the people of the world have memory, and they know where these stories end.” Never forget. Never give an inch. To hell with Fascists.

We continued our way down the streets toward our destination, though, mostly focused on the scenes in front of us because they were human and interesting and that is enough. To celebrate what is human is to spit in the eye of Fascism, after all.

Eventually we realized we were not that far from the Piazza della Signoria so we took a slight detour to get another look at the statues.

One of the things that is interesting about Florence is that you just don’t find public fountains for drinking water the way you do in Rome or in the southern Italian towns. I’m not sure why. But there are a couple, and Stacey later pointed out that one of them is actually right behind the statue of Neptune that we were standing in front of in that last photo, so we could have refilled our water bottles there if we’d known.

Being the perceptive sorts that we are, when we got to the Piazza Santa Croce, in front of the Basilica, we immediately noticed two things.

For one, there were these adorable little electric cars that were zipping around carrying tourists here and there. They’re quiet so you kind of have to keep an eye out for them, and they seemed pretty popular. There are a lot of electric cars in general in Florence.

And for another, that the entire piazza was blocked off and under construction, which meant we couldn’t really approach the church in a straight line.

We walked along the edge of the space and watched workers putting bleachers up all around the piazza and filling it with compacted sand. We knew intellectually what this was for – they were preparing for the Calcio Storico, which would take place after we left Florence, with the final being held just before we returned to the US. But it is one thing to know something intellectually, and another thing entirely to see it happen.

After we got back to Wisconsin there were a couple of days where we were still recovering from the jet lag, mostly just laying low and not doing too much, and on one of those days we decided we’d find the Calcio Storico online and watch it. You can do this too, if you want. It’s on YouTube.

Calcio Storico means “Historical Game,” and it is indeed a very old game according to an internet search that I just did. It appears to go back as far as the fifteenth century and was played on a regular basis for a couple hundred years before it died out and then was brought back in 1930. There are four teams, each representing a quartiere or neighborhood of Florence (as defined by its main church). They play two semi-final matches and the winners meet for the championship on June 24, the Feast of St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence.

It is, without question, one of the most bizarre sporting events I have ever seen, and I say this as someone who has voluntarily and repeatedly watched both Australian Rules Football and the caber toss.

It takes place on a rectangular field of compressed sand, roughly 100 meters by 50 meters – about the size of an American football field if you include one end zone, in other words – surrounded by a low wall about elbow high. There are 27 players to a side and they all play the entire game if they can. There are no subs. If you get hurt or physically thrown over the wall, you’re out. The players must be native Florentines. There are six linesmen and a main referee as well as a “judge commissioner” who remains off the field because that’s where anyone with a lick of common sense would be. There are also about a half a dozen guys in bright yellow outfits walking around handing out water bottles during the game, which lasts for 50 minutes with no breaks or meaningful stoppages of play. The yellow guys are just there on the field, milling around with their water bottles as play goes on around them. I assume they’re considered in play but not deliberately targetable, like hockey linesmen.

The game is preceded by an amount of costumed pomp and ceremony that would not be out of place in an operetta.

The point of the game is to throw a ball about the size of a volleyball into a net at the end of the field. The net stretches all the way across the field from one side to the other, but it extends only about a meter or so above the low wall at the end and if you get the ball into the net you get a point but if you miss the other team gets half a point so mostly players will try to get right up to the net before tossing it in. In the middle of the net there is a pointy medieval-style tent and that’s where the team captain stays. I don’t know what happens if you throw the ball into the tent. Probably nothing good. Every time someone scores the teams switch sides.

At the beginning of the game the players line up on their side of the field, and at some predetermined signal the referee on the side underhands the ball about thirty feet in the air so that it lands somewhere near the middle and at that point about half the players on each side square up with each other. There are MMA-style takedowns, bare-knuckle boxing matches, and more wrestling than you’ll find at the Olympics. At any given point about a quarter of the players are pinned to the sand by another quarter of the players and they stay there until they can fight their way up – there is no reset when someone scores. They can accept water bottles, though, and many do. It was a hot day, after all. The only rules are that you can’t gang up on a single player and you can’t kick someone in the head.

Meanwhile the guy who ended up with the ball just sort of loiters somewhere back in his own end, not really doing much of anything, until he sees what he thinks is an opening and then starts running toward his goal, tossing the ball to other players as needs demand, and at that point all hell breaks loose for real.

Basically it’s a cross between rugby and a bar fight. The winning team gets a free dinner.

It was FASCINATING. Go watch this. You will never see anything else quite like it, though whether this is a good thing or not is entirely up to you.

They were still setting all this up when we were there, so we skirted around the outside edge of the piazza, past the little market lining the side, and into Santa Croce.

Santa Croce was almost as lovely as Santa Maria Novella. It’s a big, bright, airy church whose construction lasted for the entire fourteenth century, a fact I discovered after I got home in keeping with my “See it now, figure it out later” philosophy of tourism, and it is currently the largest Franciscan church in the world.

Like Santa Maria Novella, it has a large number of little chapels that hive off from the main church, each of which is covered in artwork and stained glass.

This particular piece is in the Medici Chapel of the Novices, built around 1445 according to the little sign in front of it. It’s unusual to find ceramic artwork in medieval basilicas like this, so it stood out.

This one, from some point in the 1500s, is entitled “Scenes from the Life of Christ” and I have to admit that I did not picture those scenes looking quite like this as a young man growing up in my own church. I might have been more interested in them if I had.

These two pieces actually predate the church itself, having been created around the mid-1200s CE. The first one was just sitting there on a post up by the front of the church – you can see it in one of the photos of the altar above, in front of the white box and the construction netting – and I walked right by it a couple of times before realizing what it was. I’m consistently amazed at how these things are just there out in the open like that. The second one hung a bit higher.

I liked this one of St. James the Greater mostly because it serves as a reminder that the early church was not a lily-white organization, which is something many modern Americans forget if they ever knew it in the first place.

There were interesting things to see on the floor and the walls pretty much everywhere you looked.

The other thing about Santa Croce is that it has either monuments to or the final resting place of a great many scientists, both modern – such as Enrico Fermi – and older, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo Galilei.

There are similar memorials to literary and political figures such as Dante and Machiavelli.

And, of course, there is one for Michelangelo, who is actually buried here.

Santa Croce has a lot of different spaces, including a couple of cloisters, and we spent a fair amount of time wandering around the place just sort of taking it all in.

There’s also a refectory, which is where the monks would gather to eat. In every refectory we visited there was always a large painting of the Last Supper and I could never tell if this was meant to be humorous or just thematically appropriate.

The statue of St. Louis of Toulouse in the little alcove on the wall dates to the early 1400s and is another Donatello.

There was a fair amount of other art on the walls as well.

But the dominant feature of the refectory was a giant Tree of Life painted on the far wall as you entered.

While I was milling about in the refectory a man walked up to me and asked if I was an American, a question whose answer was so obvious that I saw no reason not to give it to him. He said he had been born in Iran but had moved to the United States in the 1970s and had lived in California ever since, and mostly he just wanted to talk about the horrifying crimes being perpetrated against the United States by its own government this year. We agreed that it was a dark time for the US and we hoped it would get better, especially for all of the immigrants who make the US a more interesting, prosperous, and worthwhile place. The US is a nation of immigrants, after all, and only the most bone-ignorant of fools would forget or do anything to threaten that. He was not the only person who approached me for this exact conversation while I was in Europe this summer – there were others in almost every place we went – but it was the longest of such conversations. We wished each other well in the coming times and parted in peace.

We left Santa Croce and headed out to the bus stop in order to get the C3 Bus – the first of two buses that would take us up to the Chiesa di San Miniato al Monte (the Church of Saint Miniato on the Mountain), which is higher up than the Piazzale Michelangelo and far less crowded.

While we waited, two large flatbed trucks that had just dropped off bleachers at Santa Croce trundled slowly down the narrow street and successfully turned at the corner onto another street, and if you’ve ever tried to drive in a historic Italian city or town you know exactly how much of an achievement this was. We were impressed. Honestly, I’d have put money on the truck changing the shape of something on that road and three cheers to them for not doing so.

The C3 is a short bus and a crowded one and it takes you about halfway up the mountain toward San Miniato. You get off and wait for the 12 Bus to take you the rest of the way up, and while we were there Kim noticed some old structures and wandered off to take a look.

Eventually we got on the 12 and rode the rest of the way up to San Miniato. You go there because it has the best views of Florence, though they do require a further climb up two steep sets of stairs once you get off the bus.

There are all sorts of sculptures in the two levels, as well as graves and monuments.

As you can see in the last photo above, much of the place is under construction at the moment. That included the entire façade and most of the nave. One of the reasons we’d gone to San Miniato at the time that we did was because we saw a notice that they were going to have a Gregorian Chant service and we thought that would be interesting. But it wasn’t clear where it would be.

We wandered around a bit looking at the art.

Eventually we decided that it would probably be in the crypt area, which was down a short flight of stairs. We sat there with a few other equally confused people before deciding that no, this can’t be right.

We went back up and asked a guy who looked like he belonged there, and he pointed us back into the nave – covered with plywood on both sides and floor, and with an altar under some scaffolding.

We sat there for a long time and had started to think that perhaps nothing was going to happen despite the small gathering of people sitting with us, when a solitary priest entered and started speaking to us in Italian. There would be no Gregorian Chant service. Instead, this was a regular Catholic mass, and aside from a couple of us visitors most of the people there were clearly part of the local congregation. But I grew up in the Episcopal Church and I can bob and weave with the best of them (Stand! Sit! Kneel! Good Boy!) and while we didn’t understand anything of the service it was a pleasant experience.

We rode the 13 Bus back down to Florence proper and then walked toward our apartment. By this point it was getting late and we were hungry so we took a slightly different route home – one we would end up choosing over our previous route for the rest of our time there – and ended up at a little kebab place called Il Faraone (The Pharoah) on a quiet little piazza where nobody else spoke English. We ate a lot of kebabs on this trip – mostly doner kebabs, but not always – because they’re tasty, you can’t really find them in Wisconsin, and there were a lot of opportunities for us to do so.

Il Faraone was a small family-owned take-out place and we managed to order our food without too much comedy. I also got a liter-sized bottle of iced tea because by this point I was exceedingly thirsty. We ate on one of the stone benches in the piazza across the street, surrounded by neighbors and buffeted by a fairly stiff breeze, but the food was tasty, the iced tea hit the spot precisely, and it was a very nice meal all around.

From there it was a short walk back to the apartment, where we relaxed for a bit and even managed a quick WhatsApp call to Oliver and Lauren.

Stacey and JR had gone to Cinque Terre for their anniversary that day, but they let us know when they returned and I walked over to borrow their phone again while Kim stayed home and did some laundry. I called my bank and went over the charges that I was contesting as fraudulent and they sent me a form to fill out confirming all of that and also asked me to send them a photo of the carabinieri report just to be sure, and then I thanked them and Stacey and JR and walked back to our apartment and took care of that. All of the charges were gone when I got back to Wisconsin, and we’ll call that a win.

Sometimes you just keep going with the day and it isn’t until you look back on it that you think, “Well, no wonder my feet are tired.” But that’s a pretty nice problem to have on a day like this, really.