Europe 25: Florence, Day 5

On our last full day in Florence we slept in a bit. Sometimes when you’re on vacation you should just relax now and then. You’re allowed. It was a slow morning, and that’s a lovely thing.

We finished the laundry, collecting the various bits and bobs that had been left on the porch overnight to dry. It’s a nice view from that porch, and early in the day it’s still cool enough to stand there and enjoy it.

We also spent some time grading assignments because both of us were in the middle of classes and grades wait for nobody. Kim had a summer class that in theory she could have scheduled for a time that did not overlap with our trip, since she is the one who schedules such things down at Home Campus, but by the time we decided that yes, indeed, we would actually be traveling this summer it was too late to make changes. My online class never ends – every month I get a new batch of students for a three-month run and an old batch exits at the same time – so I had essays to grade. Doing this on a phone is interesting, in the liberal arts sense of the term, the way three-headed frogs are … interesting. This was an ongoing struggle throughout the trip for both of us, but we got it done.

Eventually we wandered over to the tram station and hopped on the (now pickpocket-free) T2 to head into the city center and ended up talking with a very nice American family who had just arrived in Florence and were headed in to see the sights. We gave them the benefit of our extensive six-day-long treasure trove of Florentine knowledge, which they appreciated. They had their own plans, of course, but some of the things we discussed sounded interesting to them and they said they’d look them up later. We wished them well when we got off and then walked over to meet Stacy and JR at the Galileo Museum.

The Galileo Museum is more of a general museum of scientific history than a place dedicated to the guy on the nameplate, but there is a fair amount of Galileo stuff there as well so it’s not like they’re lying about it. We didn’t have a whole lot of time to see things – by the time we got there they were getting ready to close in an hour, but that turned out to be about the right amount of time for it.

It’s a fairly small museum of just a couple of floors, but it is full of all sorts of scientific equipment from the last five hundred years or so. Kim is a scientist and a good chunk of my dissertation involved the history of early modern science in Europe (or, more accurately, the people who conducted it) so we spent a fair amount of time just wandering around and seeing things and going “Hey, I know that name!” when we read the little explanatory cards next to the artifacts. I am sure our fellow museum-goers were suitably impressed, or at least amused.

One of the things I especially enjoyed was the display of telescopes. If you looked down the barrel of the one in the middle you could see the reflecting mirror pretty clearly and it turns out that you can, if you hold your phone still for long enough, get a decent picture that way. SCIENCE!

Kim spent a lot of time with the glassware, since as a chemist this is something she deals with fairly regularly. Not much has changed in the last few centuries when it comes to scientific glassware. Apparently they got it pretty much right the first time.

Early modern scientists had a couple of side interests that kept coming up as we walked by. For one thing, you see the word “perpetual” a lot. You can’t say they lacked ambition, at any rate. The first photo below is of a perpetual calendar that dates from the late 1600s. It still works. The second one is simply labeled as a “perpetual wheel,” which frankly wasn’t all that informative except that it has been doing whatever it was supposed to do since the late 1500s and that’s perhaps as close to perpetual as need be.

They also liked maps, which is handy because so do I. The top photo is a map of the world from the European perspective of the mid1450s or so, while the second one is the Danube River basin from a couple of centuries later. It was fun to try to figure out where things were in relation to things I knew.

Probably the star of the show, however, was the Armillary Sphere from around 1590. This sort of thing is meant to represent the orbital bodies in the sky – planets, stars, moons, and so on. This particular one was easily twice my height and festooned with paintings on the inner rings. I don’t think the rings moved, but then again I wasn’t about to find out either.

I also liked the fact that at intervals there were windows that you could go up to and look out over the city.

After a while it was time to go before they locked us in with the artifacts, so we headed out to find lunch at the Biblioteca della Oblate. As always in Florence, our route took us past some lovely spaces and eventually through the piazza with the Duomo. You can’t really escape the Duomo in Florence. All roads lead there, which is probably an idea they stole from Rome. Or maybe all roads simply lead from Rome to the Duomo and back. It’s hard to say. But the Duomo is pleasing to look at so we didn’t mind.

The Biblioteca is an actual working library. It has several floors of books that people can come and read or check out, and at the top there’s a more or less open-air café. You walk through a long open space full of students either reading, drawing, or just hanging out in the time-honored way of students, and at the end you turn right and there’s a space that looks a lot like the first one only it’s reserved for the café.

It has some lovely views from the windows.

The waiter seemed to regard us as amusing and we had a fine time just enjoying the food and the company in a really nice setting.

Afterward we went back out into the city. One of the things we’d wanted to do while in Florence was find the place that sold really, really good balsamic vinegar, and this is when we actually did so. It’s an elegant little shop that reminded me of a lot of shops that stock things I cannot afford to buy, and balsamic vinegar is all they sell. They sell it in bottles you can put in your carry-on bag for the airplane – these are actually affordable – and bottles that you would need a porter to carry home, which are not. There are all sorts of different grades and types. And if you think you’ve had balsamic vinegar because you bought some in a gallon jug at your local MegaMart here in the US, you really haven’t. They let us sample some of the various kinds – you get a tiny little spoon and it’s just the best stuff you’ve ever tasted – and eventually we walked out with two airplane-sized bottles because when are we ever going to go back there so we might as well get something. Both bottles made it safely home.

We also found a place with a nice little garden to explore, and it had a statue of Taras Sevcenko, the generally accepted poet of Ukraine. It’s spelled differently in English, but since the original is in Ukrainian and spelled with Cyrillic letters it’s hard to say whether that matters or not. The defense of Ukraine is a popular cause in Italy, as it should be – why it’s even vaguely controversial in American right-wing circles invites a lot of deeply uncharitable though wholly justified speculation – and someone had put a ribbon on the statue to drive that point home. It was nice to see.

This was also about the point where Kim taught Stacy how to play Pikman Bloom. There are invisible flowers surrounding you even as you read this, and if you have this game on your phone you can walk around collecting them and planting more. You can fight mushrooms. You can also invite your friends to fight mushrooms with you. Sometimes people send you postcards. Truly we live in an age of wonders.

Stacy and JR headed home after that, and we did the same. We took the 23 bus over to the piazza by Il Faraone and walked back along that path – a much nicer route than the one we usually took when we first arrived. It took us past a gelateria, which we made good use of – Kim’s goal in Florence was to have at least one gelato a day, and we did our best – as well as the Half-Beetle. I can explain the gelato. I can even explain the Pikman Bloom. The Half-Beetle? Yeah, I got nothing.

We spent a couple of hours finishing our grading and getting a jump on our packing, since the next day we’d be leaving Florence. Then we walked back down the nicer route, past the Half-Beetle and the gelateria to the 23 bus which took us most of the way to the Galleria dell’Accademia.

The Galleria dell’Accademia is another of the places that every tourist in Florence must visit, for one reason and one reason only: it is where Michelangelo’s statue of David is located these days. Everyone goes to see it, and who can blame them? It’s a fascinating thing, a milestone in Western art, and one of the damndest things you ever did see.

Tickets for the Galleria are timed so you have to get there at the right time and then find the right line – there are many lines, each of which is vaguely separated from all the others by a smattering of misleading signs and a few of those ribbon dividers like you get at airport security lines. We got there early enough to stop at the Tabaccheria across the street for drinks – which had to be finished before we got to the front of the line, since there is no conceivable planet on which anyone with half a brain would allow people into the Galleria with beverages – and then spent some time figuring out what line we should stand in. We ended up behind a friendly American couple – he was studying to be a nutritionist, she was an accountant, and they were considering moving to Wyoming in the near future so we wish them well with that, particularly in Wyoming which may or may not even exist – and eventually the line started to move forward and they let us in.

There’s a lot to see in the Galleria that isn’t the statue of David, of course, and we certainly did our best to see it. The first thing you see when you get inside – other than a sign pointing you toward the David statue – is this, which is certainly arresting.

It’s in a big room that has a lot of medieval and early Renaissance artwork that you can marvel at for a while.

Sometimes the fun is in the details, though. I have no idea what this bird is doing that requires it to sail in on a shower of golden rain, for example, and I’m not really sure I want to know either. Sometimes the mystery is a good thing.

Also, while I know that this is officially a painting of the Resurrection of Christ I’ll swear I’ve had this guy in some of my classes. He sits in the back, doesn’t cause trouble or ask questions, is always happy to talk with you about things other than the class, and is pretty happy with his gentleman’s C as long as it doesn’t stress him out too much. There are worse students to have in class.

But eventually you have to go Do The Thing and you walk over to the Hall of David. I don’t think that’s what it is actually called, but really that’s what it is.

You can take your time, though – it’s a long hall full of people, and all along the side there are unfinished statues by Michelangelo to examine as you walk along. It’s worth going slowly.

And then you’re there in front of the Man himself, Big Dave, and it’s really just as impressive as you’d think it would be. For one thing, it is an astonishing work of art.

For another, you don’t realize just how big it is until you’re right up on it. It towers over you, 17 feet (5 meters) high even without the pedestal. It’s seriously huge.

It stood outside in the Piazza della Signoria from the time it was unveiled in 1504 to the time it was moved into the Galleria dell’Accademia in 1873, according to an internet search that I just did. The full-sized replica that we saw on our way to the Uffizi was put there in 1910. While it was outside it got a bit of wear and tear on it, especially around the feet.

You can walk all the way around it if you’d like, and you get a view of David that you don’t usually see in the textbooks if you do.

We spent a fair amount of time there, along with everyone else. People were very polite about taking photos, though, waiting for their turn to get a selfie or a particularly good photo. It was actually a very pleasant experience even with the crowd there.

If you go off to the side there are paintings that are fun to look at for a bit – the crowd thins out pretty quickly once you get a few paces from the David – and if you continue past those paintings you end up in the Plaster Cast Gallery, which sounds a lot classier in Italian and looks like the Vatican Museum had a garage sale. It’s impressive in an overwhelming sort of way.

After that there are more rooms packed with medieval and Renaissance artworks, which seems to be the time period that Florence specializes in. And more power to them – they were fascinating and a lot of fun to look at.

There was a Tree of Life, which is always interesting to see.

The guy in the bottom left corner really makes this painting, I think. It’s like he was about to say something that he’d been working on for a while in the hopes of making a good impression but then someone dropped a cup behind him and suddenly the moment had passed. We’ve all been there, friend.

They also had a couple of paintings that had word balloons. Apparently these are not that common in medieval art, but we seemed to run into them a lot so maybe people just haven’t noticed them before. We could be pioneers. I wouldn’t put money on that, but it is at least theoretically possible.

We left the museum after that because we had dinner reservations with Stacy and JR, but we did take the time to go around the block to the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, where there is an artwork dedicated to the victims of domestic violence. Each cloth has a name, and it gets added to as people see fit. It’s a quiet but fairly powerful work, in a big and mostly empty piazza.

It was a fairly quick walk to the restaurant, and as always we walked by the Duomo though we ended up seeing it from a different angle than we usually did. It really is the center of the city in so many ways.

We also walked past an entire street full of public art, and I’m going to devote the next post to that sort of thing in Florence – there was a lot of it – but suffice it to say that it did slow us down a bit looking at it all and I suspect that is what the neighborhood wanted us to do.

We met Stacy and JR at the Trattoria de Carabaccio for a lovely dinner. This is a place where you could get cinghiale – wild boar – which was one of Kim’s goals in Florence. I stuck with my pizza, which I know I will always enjoy. I’m not that adventurous, what can I say.

Afterward we all walked back to our apartment where we hung out for a while and then sent Stacy and JR off with whatever food was worth sending home with them, since we’d be leaving the next morning and couldn’t really take anything with us. And then we finished packing and cleaning the place, a process that at some point involved taking out the trash.

Trash is a complex process in Europe – simpler in Italy than in Sweden, granted, but still a lot more involved than you find in the US where municipalities are just glad you’re not tossing it into the water supply. We separated out a bunch of different categories and then I rode the tiny elevator down to the street and walked down the block to the various concrete trash containers. There’s a fob in the apartment that you use to open the containers, and eventually it all gets sorted out. We watched a truck pick up the trash one day as we walked along – it literally does pick it up. There’s a crane attachment on the truck and it fits over a big knob on top of the container, lifts it up in the air, dangles it over the truck bed, and then somehow opens the bottom so the stuff falls out. Then it reverses the whole process. It’s quite a sight.

Before we went to bed, though, we got word from our friends Josh and Sarah that the next leg of our trip would be a bit different than we’d planned. They were in Lisbon during the time we were in Florence and we were going to meet them in Porto for the following week, but a situation had come up that required them to return home (which was absolutely the right call) so we’d be on our own for our week in Portugal instead. We will simply have to schedule another trip with them at some point!

We didn’t get much sleep that night, between getting everything done and walking up early the next morning to leave, but that’s just how things go sometimes.