It was another beautiful morning in Tuscany, and I was enjoying awaking early and going out onto the spacious grounds of the hotel for my morning Tai Chi, looking out to distant mountains off to the west. It was remarkably green for November, warmer than I expected Italy to be. In a few weeks we would be traveling farther south to the Amalfi coast, which is almost tropical and features palm trees and groves of oranges.
This morning we boarded the coach and drove to Florence for
a walking tour of the old part of the city where we would be staying
at our Airbnb in a little over a week. We started our day at the Piazza Michelangelo,
which is on a hill on the south bank of the Arno River, just east of the
center of Florence, with a stunning view of the city. The iconic Brunelleschi’s dome, built in the 1400s, was in the center of it
all, and it was huge.
Our guide was Francesca, who had a lovely Italian accent and a background in art history and architecture.
Francesca took us on a walking tour of the city, where we admired the beautiful Florentine art and architecture all around us. The only city of comparable beauty which we have visited is Paris. Every corner we turned there was another masterpiece, a cathedral or a building constructed by the wealthy Medici family in the 16th Century. In our country, a building is old if it dates to the 1700s, but here we were seeing buildings going back to the 1400s and 1500s, and we would be seeing even older buildings, medieval castles and cathedrals, in other parts of Italy in the coming days. Our walking tour ended at The Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze, home of so many paintings and sculpture that you could spend days there, but best known for Michelangelo's sculpture of David, which stood at the end of a long gallery. Francesca clearly admired the great sculpture and she opened our eyes to the many details you can only see up close - the veins on the hands, the muscles and tendons behind the calf. Along the way were a series of sculptures called the Prisoners or Slaves, that appear to be struggling to break free from the marble blocks from which they are carved.
I had heard about the David all my life, but it was
absolutely stunning to actually see it in all its glory, 14 feet tall, five
tons, which Francesca told us was a piece of flawed marble. What a genius Michelangelo was to create such
a work of art like this! The sculptor famously
described the process of creating these statues as a matter of seeing the form within
the marble and then removing everything that didn’t belong. He did not so
much create David as reveal him by chiseling away the block in which
he was encased.
Later, we had time on our own in Florence, and while Martha explored I sat in the Piazza di Santa Croce for awhile drinking an espresso and watching a little girl chase the pigeons. There were a lot of scam artists in this part of the city, and we would also see them in Pisa and Rome, Nigerians according to Jackie trying to sell "Folexes" – fake Rolexes. It was best to just ignore them and not make eye contact.
While others were exploring some of the shops in the area, we made our way using Google Maps to the Airbnb where we would be staying next week, just around the corner from the Duomo (more on Brunelleschi’s dome later in this blog). We were a little surprised to find the entrance on a narrow sidewalk, no more than three feet wide, on a road trafficked by cars and buses that passed by very closely. Half a block away, you could turn the corner and the street was a pedestrian one.
In Florence and elsewhere in Italy, we saw nothing but tiny
cars. Our Mini Cooper would have been
considered large. With gasoline the
equivalent of $8.75/gallon, it makes sense to drive economical cars or take public transport.
Some of the cars were so short that their owners backed them in a street
with parallel parking spaces straight back to the curb.
After we left Florence, we stopped at San Gimignano, a medieval walled city where a dozen tower houses have been preserved. The towers were once a sign of prestige for the wealthy families who lived there. Jackie took us to a gelato place voted the best in Italy, Gelateria Dondo, and while I am not a gelato or ice cream afficionado, I joined Martha in enjoying a sample. Delizioso!
The sun was setting, and our Jackie, our tour director, hastened us on to our next stop before it got dark, the Borge Machiavelli Estate, where Niccolò Machiavelli once lived when the Medici were out of power in 1512 and he was exiled from Florence, and where he wrote his most famous book, The Prince. The house is still owned by the Machiavelli family, and we walked to a wine cellar and adjoining tavern through an underground tunnel supposedly used by Machiavelli.
The estate was a beautiful one with lime and orange trees,
and was also known for its black truffles.
The evening shadows were growing long by then, but we all walked down
into the woods below the tavern where we met Pepe, a truffle-hunting dog. Pepe did locate several truffles,
and while part of me suspected they had been planted (they were very close to
the estate), he did in fact detect them, and Martha had the experience of
holding a black truffle in her hands.
Truffle hunting was followed by a delicious Tuscan dinner and live music, and to be honest, I did not think to write down what was on the menu when I made my notes for this blog – it all runs together, evening after evening of good food and good wine! As I am writing this now, it is hard to believe that we enjoyed all of these things – Florence, the statue of David, gelato at San Gimignano, truffle hunting – in a single day. Life is full of adventure in Italy.
As we returned at the end of the day, Jackie pointed out the window at another sunset in Tuscany on the horizon: "Look!" she said. "How beautiful!"
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