Freezing in Firenze

Florence, day two of two. I'm up and at 'em early, hitting the sights like a man who witnessed a twenty year old across the street last night but went to bed alone. A quick sidewalk breakfast of a cappucino and a roll, and, in no particular order, I visit:

• Museum San Marco (old monestary with loads of Fra Angelico frescos, also the home of Salvadore, the bishop who ousted the Medicis from power, then took on the Pope and ended up hung and burned to a crisp in front of the cheering masses)
• Medici Chapel (Medici family basically ran Florence and helped usher in the Renaissance through support of scientists and humanist artists), with more Michaelangelo scuptures
• Uffiti Gallery, the big art museum in Florence. Home of the Birth of Venus. You know, the one with the hot chick in a clam.
• Duomo Baptistry (frescos and some of the first art that utilized mathematically created perspective drawing)
• Duomo Museum (more art)
• Museum of Science, with loads of medieval and Rennaisance science, including a bunch of Galileo stuff. Like his finger! Preserved like a Saint's relic! Something for the secular. I even broke the rules and took my picture with it. To be posted later. Or made into a shrine in the corner of my office.
• The Ponte Vecchio (bridge) with young lovers and gold merchants and locks on the gate (a gate at the middle of the bridge is loaded with locks inscribed with lovers' names; the guy locks it to the gate and throws the key into the river to symbolize the never ending affection. Except for the one or two combination locks)
• The Pitti Palace (yet more art)
• Some Internet updating
• Another big dinner
• Bed

OK. I'm dull Even I wish that Sussex would keep a blog. With pictures.

So, remember how cold it was? It just gets worse. This is a bone chilling cold, rushing down the Tuscan valleys from the north. Or something to that effect, as noted in my Michaelangelo novel. I finally give in and buy a new hat (toque) and gloves. What trendy Italian brands did i find? That would be, Levi and Champion. The added warmth was needed and fully appreciated. After all, my across-the-street friend has left the shutters closed!

I have used up my list of stuff to see in Florence, so I plan my next stop, the Cinque Terre coastline in north western Italy...

Enough of this Balogna; I'm off to Florence...

So there I was, tootling through the Tuscany hillside, with a brief stopover to change trains in Bologna. Thankfully short; the cold seems to be increasing as the trip continues, as one might expect, but hopefully as I head south things will get somewhat better. So south I head.
Florence is the first place I see the guide books warn about pickpockets, miscreants and ne'er do well's lurking around the train station, so I detrain on my guard. But the cold has followed me to Florence, and the seedier side of the population does not appear to want to brave the weather for the meager tourist trade this time of year. I escape unscathed, my pockets unpicked, fully creant and e'er well.
On the train trip down, I cosulted the RS bible for places to stay as usual, and programmed the three more likely ones into Teri. I'm early enough into town this time to be able to hit some sights if I get checked in quick enough. One promising place is, get this, the Oblate Sisters of the Assumption. I love assuming, so I'm going with my initial guess that the definition of 'oblate' in this case is 'a layperson dedicated to religious life' as opposed to 'having the shape of a spheroid generated by rotating an ellipse about its shorter axis'. Although, the latter does seem to be the classic nun shape, at least in 'The Sound of Music', Julie Andrews not withstanding.
As it stands, the closest hotel to the train station is also the closest hotel to the think of things: the Hotel Sole. I decide that if it even approaches the Milan hotel in cleanliness (let's call that -2dB Speronari) I'm there, and off to get down to the business of touristing. At first sight, it does not look promising. The lane is about ten feet wide, with tall buildings leaning out toward each other, blocking my GPS signal. The hotel is located on the third floor (that's three up from the street) of a derelict building. The ground and next two floors up are empty and under dusty construction. But, to my suprise, the hotel, once entered, is delightfully clean, and super cheap due to the season and construction. I toss my stuff in the room, and bug out to see the big sights. The Oblate Sisters will have to wait for next time (I assume).
So I've been reading this 'Agony and the Actsacy' book, not sure if I have mentioned that yet. About Michaelangelo and his life and art, which has a lot to do with Florence. So I'm running around looking at the little touches the author put in here and there (statues on corners, bridges, etc), and around the corner I run up against the Duomo. Well, not literally. It's kind of too big for that. And no, that's not my picture, but I do have plenty. Again I cannot upload from my camera at this cafe. But the duomo was, well, big, as you can see. I climbed aalllllll the way up (463 steps) to the tip of that dome, right to where the tippy top cone with the ball on it is, just in time for stunning sunset views of Florence and Tuscany. I can see why so many people come to visit and never leave.

The Duomo done, I clamber down the 463 steps to terra firma, and head up the street to the Accademia museum. The home of David. The Michaelangelo scupture. A whole couple of chapters in the book. I head in, and, unlike the common folk rushing to see the masterpiece, I take my time in the first gallery that holds four unfinished 'Prisoners' statues by Michaelangelo. I evaluate each in turn, checking out all 360 degrees, as the novel harps on how Michaelangelo preferred sculpture as it is the true art form that must be perfect fom all angles. This doesn't really hold true when the rear of the work is a big untouched hunk of marble. So, I head on down to where the main attraction is:

This guy is big! 17 feet, they say. I'd hate to see Goliath. But I do get to peruse this one in all 360 degrees, and from all sorts of other angles (no, Sussex, not that one) on an interactive computer exhibit from Stanford university, where the whole thing is scanned in 3D.

But, after fifteen or twenty minutes, I have long exhausted my patience for looking at a naked man that isn't in the mirror, and head back to the hopping part of town. I wander around the central shopping district, about four large blocks with lots of little streets, nooks and crannies, filled with high end shops and low end street vendors. The shops include about 90% of the advertisers in a typical issue of Cosmopolitan; the vendors sell "the same handbag - for you, ten euro", and other knockoff leather, electronics etc. Nothing much is catching my eye (well, other than a few $2000 watches and the tall high heeled boots walking all over the place), so my wallet escapes unscathed. Until I decide that, in spite of the chilly weather, it's time for more gelato. I pop into a ritzy cafe and order a cone with three dollops. That would be, oh, fifteen euro!!! I double check that. Yes, the most expensive ice cream I ever hope to pay for. Yes, it was good, but let's be real. That's over twenty bucks. Almost my hotel rate.

Oh well. Even with that unexpected hit, I'm still up for a fancier than normal dinner, as the hotel was 30 euro per night. I have full on feast of mixed meats, pasta, wine, dessert, coffee, the only thing missing would be a date, I suppose. I read more Ecstacy and Agone instead. Then, suitably warmed up by a half bottle of rosso, I head back to bed so as to hammer through the remaining cornucopia of sights the next day.

Remember how I described the buildings as about ten feet apart? I go into my room, and directly across the street is the apartment of some young thing, practicing her dance moves in the mirror, obviously readying herself for a night of driving those young Italian boys crazy. I look at her (well, shame on me). She looks at me. She closes her shutters. Sigh. To be twenty again. Or rich. Or twenty and rich.

Maybe I wouldn't have to read while I eat.

Padua (or, is that Padova?) and Ravenna

So there I am, leaving Venice. Seems like weeks ago. Oh yes, it was weeks ago. Sorry about that. Rather than guess about transfers and train schedules, I buy my bigglietto to Padua only, to determine my next leg to Ravenna later. I consciensously write down from the departures post all the stops along the way, then notice that the list stops at the stop that is listed as the "via" city on my ticket. Am I learning something about the train ticket system? As it turns out, no. At this point I figure that I would have to detrain at my "via" town and read their schedule to determine further stops. Still not sure if this is always true or not. Anyway, on to Padua (or is that Padova).
What's the big deal here? Or there? The Scrovegni Chapel. Built buy Enrico Scrovegni in order to correct the sins of (and subsquently release him from eternal damnation) his father, the evil usurer Reginaldo. I didn't know that heaven and hell worked that way. Wait a second; that's pretty much the spiel of televangelists, I suppose.Anywho, this place is filled with Giotto art, groundbreaking in its time for revolutionalizing fresco art. Protected from the elements by admission of only 25 people at a time through a series of temperature and humidity gates, it is one of Italy's more spectacular chapels. Or so I've been told. Once again, I am stymied my 'site under restoration' signs. Son of a beeyotch! Italian art and buildings are in the shop as often as their Fiats!
Well, my bad for not bothering to check ahead. I drop into town to see what else there is to see. Hmmm. Museum? Closed Monday. Checjed out the old University (where Galileo and Copernicus actually discovered the theory of gravity through analyses of beer bongs centuries befor Newton). Good to see that their modern counterparts were keeping up their end. There were girls and boys about, dressed up in odd clownish outfits, covered with flour, standing on benches reading some sort of list, pausing to chug something alchoholic out of a coke bottle after every sentence.
This is from a little video of this to analyse upon my return; I am interested in the scholarly aspects of this ritual:

Further through town, I checked out the Prato Della Valle:

Which I thought might be a Nascar track from the 1600s. Nascart? Checking online, I find that they actually race Ferraris there occasionally...
From that idyllic spot, it was a short jaunt to yet another basilica with to visit another dead saint, this time it's St Anthony. The Basilica of St Anthony (aptly named), is one of the most popular pilgrimmage sites in Itally, St Anthony being a rather popular saint: he is the patron saint of travelers (hooray), amputees, donkeys (I don't make this up - it's from the RS guide), etc etc etc. Inside, it is somewhat obvious that this is a pilgrimmage site; plenty of locals coming in, crossing themselves, rushing to the relics, praying, general pilgrim type stuff. Most chapels I see are set up more as tourist attractions than this. Who was this guy? Young aristocrat, gave up the rich life, and as he had quite the gift of gab, St Francis (you'll meet him in a future posting) sent him on the speaking tour. Along the way he did some handy miracles like bringing back to life a stabbed wife, re-attaching the foot of a young man, that kind of thing. He died early, so the church honoured him by, well what else? Made him a saint (that's good), built him a cathedral (again; nice touch), then dug up his bones, and putting his jaw, tongue and vocal chords on display (too freaky for me), while the rest of him gets stuck in a sarcophagus in another section of the church, where pilgrims come to leave pictures of things they need help with. There are sickly looking kids, old people, a few pictures of crashed cars (?), all lining up to be the next miracle on XXXIVth street.
That pretty well did it for me and Padua (or is that Padova). On to Ravenna, first passing through the University on the way back to see how many passed out students I could find. None. Just the occassional dusting of flour sprinkled around as mute witness to the earlier festivities...
So, an hour and ahalf later, it's arrival at Revenna!

There's not much to Ravenna. But, I managed to get completely turned around there. My trusty Rick Steve's guide is completely wrong when it describes how to get to the Hotel Diana. His map does nto reflect reality, or the GPS. So after a it's back to the cheap and nasty hotel right by the train station. Ahhh, the Hotel Ravenna, in all it's smokey glory. You really know what you are getting in to when the hotel doesn't have the imagination to come up with a better name than that. But on the up side, 40 euro is pretty well the best rate I've seen anywhere, which means dinner should be a four star affair. I dump the gear and head out to suss out the tour route for the next day, as all the sites are now closed, it being early evening. The sussing done (mmm...sussing....), I pop into the local Internet joint to post the Oberbozen-Vicenza story (man, that was a while ago). Somehow, a couple hours on the computer only cost 2 euro, so I am now totally stoked to blow bucks on fine food. Some big mixed (mista) meat plate, the obligatory 1/2 bottle of wine, ravioli, dessert, oh my god. I just roll myself back to the hotel and deflate for the night.
Attractions aren't opening anytime early, so I sleep in 'till nine, then hit the shower. Where I discover the best thing about my cheap room. I have been placed in the handicapped suite, so the bathroom is one big tiled room with the shower head up and next to the toilet. I was able to sh*t, shower and shave sitting down the entire time. Yes, you girls reading this are probably disgusted by that admission, but every guy out there is agreeing with me that all I needed was a beer fridge and a TV remote and I would be in real man-heaven. No damned somber cherubs with harps hanging around in MY tiled paradise.
Somehow, I tear myself away from that happy place, check out, check my bags and head out to find out what in Ravenna is getting renovated during my visit. The museum? No! It is quite open, and open quiet. I am the first and only one there, so there is a security guard walking along with me, opening each room for me as I go. From there, the Basilica de San Vitale, the real reason I did the side trip to this Ravenna. This church was put up about 600AD, and is one of most Byzantine (think Turkey) (the country, not the bird) churches in Italy.

The layout is octagonal as opposed to the traditional cross layout. All mosaic similar to San Marcos in Venice, but much older style art. Very cool.

Earlier versions of Christ, clean shaven, like the Romans portrayed him.
Next to the basilica is a little mausoleum (Galla Placidia); more of the same type of mosaics, but in a smaller, more intimate, well, death room. No body parts on display, happily.
There were a couple other churches of the same era in town I popped into as well, with similar mosaic art but of not quite the same scale. Then, around the cormer from one of them, there's a little mausoleum labeled "Dante's Tomb". I always wondered where in hell that was.
Get it? Where in.. oh, forget it.
And nearby is the Dante museum. My interest is piqued; I head on in, to find various trinkets and histories about that divinely comedic fellow. Then I see the box where the local monks hid his remains in when they broke into his crypt because the Pope wanted to steal the body and put it on display in Florence and what the hell was with these medieval priests anyway? That did it for me in Ravenna, so it was back to grab a panini, cappucio, the bags, and tickets to the next stop on the magical body part tour. Wgere would that be? Why Florence, of course. I know, don't call you Florence.
This would be my introduction to the hills of Tuscany, which snuck up on me as I was reading on the train along the way. We had a loong tunnel , which popped us out in the middle of a sunny valley, like something out of one of those movies with titles like "Under the Tuscan Sun" or something like that. The only difference that it being fall, all the trees are changing color; it was spectacular. And if I were at someplace that I could access my pictures at (I don't know how Steve Raffo is pulling that off, must have the divine assistance of the GSM, I suppose), I would show you how that looked. Maybe on the next installment I'll be able to back-fill this post.
Till then, I am currently in Rome and it's late, so I am going to do what the Romans do...