Florence

Our trip in Rome ended and with those two weeks gone, I head off to Florence for a week.  I feel like I am leaving home, to leave the streets I have come to love, and romp off to another city to explore.  It feels good to have no roots and simply drift from one place to another.  To have all that you need packed up into a bag on your back traveling along with you.  So now I find myself in Florence, and as much as I did in Rome, I don’t think I did enough.  I never quite feel like I did enough in any of the places I have been, but at the same time, I look back on what I did, I see that I couldn’t have done any more.  So now I set my sights on Florence and all that she may hold. 

One of the best things about Florence is the hotel I am staying at.  It has a sense of humor and elegance at the same time with each room themed with a famous painter with their paintings on the wall, and the room decorated with them in mine.  I was staying in the Boticelli room, with little angels looking down on me from the ceiling.  The best part of the hotel is the owner of it.  Our abroad program has stayed in this hotel for many years, and the owner of the place is great friends with our main teacher Graham so we get along great.  The owner Bruno is a hilarious man and so full of joy and fun.  We would go out drinking and he buys all of us drinks and tells us that we are “beautiful,” somehow beautiful means so many things, just fun and good spirited and interesting and such.  We were all “beautiful” and there was just a great time to be had.

Florence is quite a beautiful city.  The town of the Renaissance so they say, and it is quite full of art and all the things which the Renaissance brought to the world.  The Duomo here is one of the more daunting that we have seen, especially when considered how large it is in comparison to the size of the city when it was created.  The history of the duomo is interesting and aspiring.  It was started when the town was small and wanted to declare its strength in the countryside, and they built everything but the dome, and the proposed size of the dome would be the largest in the world.  Brunelleschi managed to solve the problem and created the dome that now towers over the city visible from miles away over all the whole city. 

The art here was also quite amazing.  The Uffizzi Gallery had numerous wonders that like most art comes alive like nothing before when seen In person.  The best thing for me though was the statue of David found in another gallery.  It is touted to be incredible around the world, and going in I had a lot built up around it for being so famous.  I found myself wondering what was so amazing about it that it should stand apart from all the other statues that I have seen.  In the moment that I saw the statue, I understood why.  It is as if the rock hurler had been taken from life and simply frozen in time waiting for any moment to wake up and simply hop off the stand and walk away.  I sat down and started to sketch him as I had found myself drawing most everything these days.  As has happened a few times before, in the beginning I sat in solitude unnoticed by the people around me, but by the time an hour or so go by and the drawing had taken shape and started to look quite good, I had gathered a crowd of people stealing glances at my sketchbook.  The best moment was when a group of school students were walking through and they paused to listen to their teacher.  One of the boys saw my drawing, and stopped to watch for a bit, and then as some of his friends stood in front of me, he cleared them away to let me see the statue better and continue my drawing.  (Another time at the Campidoglio, a group of Asians treated me like a rockstar and took pictures of me and my sketchbook).  I find that drawing is the best way to make friends.

The food here, has been the best since I arrived in Italy.  Within minutes of arriving, I came upon the most amazing dessert I have come across in my life.  It was as layered as was Rome.  Starting on the bottom, was a freshly cooked waffle then on the top of that comes two flavors of gelato to your choosing, I got peach and vanilla bean, then comes another waffle topped with some whipped cream, and then for the final touch, warm melty Nutella lathered over the whole thing.  This column of goodness was out of this world.  The five of us that got it, stood there without a word for five minutes completely engrossed.  Among the other foods that stood out in Florence was Ribollita soup which is a specialty of the area made up of things I cannot remember, and it was so thick and rich that you could eat it with a fork.  Then there was the strangely typical of Italy good Chinese food, and even an amazing buffet with all the Italian greats for the small sum of 7 euros. 

The Ponte Vecchio is one of the more interesting buildings there, being a normal bridge across the River Arno that had buildings latch onto the sides of it creating a street along the bridge.  The buildings stick off the side of it and have little wooden stilts sticking onto the side of the bridge like spider legs.  We had a great dinner on the last day there just on the side of the Arno with a perfect view of the bridge where we could watch the sun set and the shadows change on the bridge which took on a variety of different identities as the sun changed.  Another night, a group of us happened on a strange little intervention on the side of the river just a few hundred feet down from the bridge.  There was a small turf soccer field placed on the bank of the river with netting on the sides to keep the ball from falling in.  We had a great game there that even involved a bunch of fans cheering suddenly to our surprise when I scored a goal.  My team lost in a nerve-racking 11 to 10 game.