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.

Europe 25: Florence, Day 2

It has always struck me as kind of odd to spend a whole lot of time and energy to get to a place only to go somewhere else almost immediately, but that’s what we did on our second full day in Florence. It worked out.

Our plans were to take the train a little over an hour to the nearby city of Lucca. I like trains in general, and one of my wish list items for the last couple of trips was to take a train to one of our destinations. We’d taken the train from the Rome airport into the city every time we’d been there but somehow that seemed different, and this would be a “real train ride” instead. I am not sure why I made this distinction in my head, but so it goes. And Lucca turned out to be a lovely place, in some ways nicer than Florence itself.

We took the T2 tram to the train station in Florence to meet Stacey, as JR had decided to sit this one out after all of the walking the previous day. The train station is right there in the middle of town and the tram goes right by it – it’s another of the things that we passed every time we wanted to get to the historical part of town, along with the Duomo – so that part was easy. Finding Stacey, though, was a bit of a trick. We got off the tram and noticed the big open entrance to the station a bit to the right so we headed in that direction but this, it turned out, led into a lower level of the station, a big open space full of shops and restaurants, most of which were closed at that hour. Eventually we found a staircase and went to the upper level and walked until we found the door that we could have just entered had we gone to the left and up the stairs when we got off the tram. Thus we came up on Stacey from behind.

The train ride was as nice as I had hoped it would be, and in a little over an hour we found ourselves in Lucca.

Lucca is a pretty town of about 90,000 people, according to a quick internet search that I just did. It sits on the site of older towns stretching back to the Etruscans, and for much of the medieval and early modern period it was an independent republic. The Luccani built walls around the city starting in the 1500s and if Wikipedia is to be believed Lucca is the second largest intact example of a fully walled Renaissance city after Nicosia, Cyprus. The walls replaced older Roman and medieval walls, and you can just go up on top and walk around the old city anytime you want, and eventually we did just that.

Our first mission, however, was to find a coffee shop.

In order to do that we passed by a piazza that had a statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi in the middle – a fairly common sight in Italy, as he occupies a very similar cultural niche in Italy to the one that George Washington occupies in the US – and some interesting floral arrangements, one spelling out “Puccini” since the composer was born in Lucca, and the other more prosaically spelling out “Lucca.” You have to admire that kind of effort.

Eventually we did find a coffee shop. You can’t walk more than a hundred meters in Italy without finding a coffee shop, after all – I think it’s a law or it might just be a cultural imperative, and either way we support it fully – and we made ourselves at home there.

We didn’t really have any plans beyond “get to Lucca” so the rest of the day was mostly just the three of us wandering around and finding things that were worth seeing. One of the first of these was a small market in the Piazza del Giglio, with vendors selling everything from clothing to jewelry to photographs to meats, cheeses, bread, and pastries. There was an amazing photographic print that I left there because I couldn’t figure out how I’d ever get it back to the US intact, but I ended up getting an olive-wood spider (which is not an arachnid but is instead a kitchen tool used to scoop pasta and similar things out of hot liquids) and a pile of pastries, while Kim explored a jewelry booth and came away with a pair of earrings shaped like long-stemmed cherries. You can tell that people have a bit of trouble figuring out how these work because as Kim was examining them the vendor came over and immediately said, “Come funziona?” (“How does it work?”) and then demonstrated the process with the ease of someone who has done that many times before.

The food vendors in this place were very forward when it came to offering samples, and I can’t say that I saw that as a problem as it meant I got to try a great many tasty things. It also meant that they sold a great many of those tasty things, so in the end it worked out well for everyone. The guy below got me to try a piece of braseola, for example – a Sardinian cured beef – that was astonishingly good, and I really need to figure out if I can get that in the US or not.

I ended up taking my pastries and other goodies over to the shady benches on the side while Kim and Stacey continued to look around, and I had a grand time just watching the people go by. Lucca gets tourists, but nowhere near in the numbers that Florence does, so a lot of the people there were locals out and about and the rest seemed mostly to be German. It was an interesting crowd.

From there we just started walking. One of the first places we landed was the Chiesa di San Giusto, a twelfth-century church that was just sort of standing there by the side of the road. That’s the thing about Italy – you just walk along the street and these things just appear without any notification or ceremony. They’re just part of the fabric of life there. It was a fascinating little church to poke our heads into for a bit.

We continued on up a very narrow street and along the way we passed a good-sized group of men just sitting at a long table enjoying their lunch. We didn’t think too much about it – lots of people do that sort of thing in Italy, and it should be more common everywhere really.

And then they broke into song.

 

It turns out that they were a Sardinian men’s choir visiting Lucca, presumably to give a concert or two, and having spent most of my teens and twenties in one choir or another I know that such groups are always just a heartbeat away from doing that sort of thing. It comes with the territory. They did a couple of songs, actually, and while some people just kept walking – why, I do not know – they did gather quite a crowd by the end. As, of course, they intended.

From there we walked a bit further up the road until we found the Chiesa di San Cristoforo, which at the time was hosting a photography exhibit by an artist named Stefano Lotumolo. His specialty, according to the little card we got from the exhibit, is “traveling continuously to meet remote populations and document their lifestyles, customs, and the most fascinating ancestral rites.” He’s a talented photographer and he seems to have a knack for putting himself in interesting places, so it was an enjoyable exhibit.

The church itself was also interesting, particularly if you peered around the barriers to the empty areas of the building. It was covered in names, for example. They seemed to be members of the church who had died, and some of them were quite recent. The floor art was interesting as well.

Just up the street from that was a little stand selling fruit and candy and other things, and it struck me as funny that the Italian word for “soft” in the sense that candies can be soft is “morbido,” and I spent the rest of the day imagining little sugary sweets dressed in black and playing depressing songs on tiny guitars. This is why you can’t take me anywhere.

We stopped for lunch in the Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, which was a Roman amphitheater before it slowly disappeared over the centuries. It still has the rounded shape of the original building, though – a negative space into which people have poured restaurants. It was a hot day and we were generally happy to sit in the shade of the umbrellas outside and enjoy some good food for a while, and eventually we set out again but even as you go around the outside of the Piazza you can still see the rounded shape of the original building.

Eventually we ended up at the city wall. You can’t really avoid them once you’re in central Lucca – any direction you walk you’ll eventually bump into them. The thing about the city wall that isn’t immediately obvious when you think about it is that the wall is surprisingly wide. Like wide enough to explore underneath wide. Wide enough to have an entire road on top with buildings on either side wide. A lot wider than you think wide.

We explored underneath the walls for a bit. There were caverns and a squadron of attack pigeons and eventually we found ourselves in a cul-de-sac outside and had to retrace our steps to where we started where there was also a little pathway that took us the twenty vertical feet or so up to the top of the wall.

It was a lovely path to walk down, shady with trees and with interesting views of the city. Eventually we found a small museum dedicated to Lucca’s history – maybe three or four rooms including the gift shop, but with the inestimable value of also having a public restroom – and spent some time looking around the place. There was even a short movie that you could watch for as long as you cared to do so, and that’s always a nice thing.

I finished with the place a bit earlier than Kim or Stacy so I went back outside to sit in a shady spot and watch the world pass by. Eventually I heard a low rumble that got slowly louder, and when I looked up I saw a carabinieri car go by followed by about a hundred Harley riders on parade. It took them maybe five or ten minutes to pass, much to the annoyance of the museum operator who came out and performed several Irritated Italian Gestures at them before going back inside.

Me? I’m just thinking that I have traveled several thousand miles from a medium-sized city in Wisconsin to a medium-sized city in northern Italy and the Harley dudes have followed me even so. Harleys are a central part of Wisconsin culture, after all. They’re made here, and the way you know that your social movement has reached peak Wisconsin acceptability is when it gets adopted by the Harley dudes in your town. I used to do the annual “Walk A Mile In Her Shoes” event sponsored by the YWCA, where local men put on high heels and – wait for it – walk a mile through town as a way to raise money for domestic violence prevention efforts, and the year when a dozen Harley dudes showed up on their bikes sporting some of the most fabulous shoes I have ever seen I knew the event had arrived.

It was a nice and much quieter walk back to the train station after that, as we made our way along the wall and then down into the town for gelato before heading over to the station.

The ride back was just as nice as the ride there – seriously, the US needs to up its rail game – and we soon found ourselves back at the Florence train station where Stacey left to go to her apartment and Kim and I took the T2 tram back to ours for a siesta. When you get out of the tram at our stop you have to go over a little creek that they kind of walled off, and it was a pretty walk back to our building.

Rested and restored after our break, we headed back to the train station on the tram and then walked over to the Chinese restaurant where we’d agreed to meet Stacey and JR for dinner.

Florence is a more cosmopolitan place for food than Rome, in my limited experience. In Rome you generally got Italian food. Very good Italian food, and to be honest better Italian food than in Florence. But mostly Italian food. Florence, however, has all sorts of food. Our neighborhood, for example, was a decent walk outside of the historic district and full of places selling food that advertised themselves as halal. We tried one of them and it was very good. Also, when we’d walk back from the historic district with Stacey and JR we’d hit a point where several roads came together in a tangled mess that never failed to confuse GoogleMaps. All you had to do was continue straight across, underneath the tower and across the various streets in a more or less straight line to the other side of the intersection a hundred meters away, but the GPS always wanted us to go in several different directions at once. That intersection was the point where Stacey and JR would split off to go to their apartment,and then we’d continue the ten more minutes back to ours. In those ten minutes we would pass six different Peruvian restaurants. We meant to try one, but never quite did. I suppose if we ever go back we will.

So it was not a surprise to find a Chinese restaurant in Florence, in other words.

It is a fact, though, that every ethnic restaurant that exists in a place other than where that ethnic group started has to do at least some translating for the local crowd. This is how you end up with Tex Mex food, for example, or General Tso Chicken in the US. This is also why the menu at our restaurant consistently translated “dumpling” as “ravioli.” You could get “Ravioli di gamberi” for example (shrimp and pork dumplings) or “ravioli alla griglia” (fried dumplings). Every culture on earth has a dish that is basically savory fillings wrapped in dough, and it is interesting to see how people try to bridge that gap.

I had Kung Pao Chicken and I have to say it was very good. So if you find yourself in Florence and craving good Chinese food, I can happily recommend the place.

Right across the street from the restaurant was a gelato place, and that was a must – Kim’s goal for this part of the trip was to have gelato every day, and we did our best.

From there we just sort of ambled our way back to our apartment, past various shops (when did Carhartt become a status brand in Europe?) and eateries. Italian streets are rarely empty until very late at night, and you feel safe walking around after dark in a way that feels less and less common these days here in the US. It was a nice walk back.