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On Friday night, I went to Luzern with Hp who was going to meet Susan there later for a movie. We wandered around Luzern looking at stores and generally killing time. Pay attention, the "killing time" theme is a reoccuring one. So they went to go see the movie and I still had some time to kill. I wandered quite a long way away from Luzern and back and got my train to the place where I would get the train to Italy, Arth-Goldeau. This must have been at a higher altitude, because it was seriously cold here. Not thinking to conserve my energy, I decided to take a little wandering tour of this place too while I waited. A nice little town - they could lose the McD's though.
Ok, so the night train shows up and I get all that taken care of. I shared a compartment with 2 Italian guys who, not surprisingly, talked to each other quite extensively in Italian. They both spoke perfect English, though. They both seemed to think it was highly critical that we keep the door locked as much as possible. Oh ya, one of the guys had a son who was sleeping when I got there and I didn't even notice him until he got up the next morning.
So the next morning at about 5:30, the train official in charge of our car woke us up. She had short bright red hair - very Swiss. And at 6:00 I was in the train station in Florence, Italy. The fact that my hotel was right across the street from the train station was helpful at this point. I went over there and signed in and dropped off my precious Ortlieb in their little luggage room. I was a little nervous about this, but I really didn't want to carry my stuff all over the place either.
Back outside, it was very clear that again, I had underestimated the severity of the Italian weather. It was Cold. Big time freezing cold. I'm not a wimp with cold weather, but it was below freezing, windy, cloudy and I was going to be outdoors most of the day.
When I planned this trip to Italy, at the top of the list of things to see was the Perseus by Benvenuto Cellini. This monumental bronze stands in the Piazza della Signoria (the Loggia actually) which is the main place in Florence. So I headed right over there. On the way, I couldn't help noticing the Duomo, the huge cathedral that dominates the city's skyline. Huge doesn't really do it justice. Ok, I made it to the Piazza della Signoria - with many consultations with my map. I was admiring the fine sculputre in the Loggia wondering where Perseus was hiding when I realized that there was a disturbing lack of symmetry in the sculpture placement. I went over to check out the sign labeling the peices in the Loggia (which was only in Italian; a common problem) and sure enough, there was a big empty plynth where headless body of Medusa should be lying under the foot of Perseo. Grrrr.
Ok, onward. I had managed to kill a couple of hours at this point by just walking around in the cold looking around. So by now, it was about 8:20 and I had noticed that the Galleria degli Uffizi opened at 8:30. I went back there and WOW! what a sight awaited me. An ocean of Japanese tourists had flooded the Piazzale degli Uffizi. Well, they may have been Chinese or Korean, etc, but they certainly seemed very Asian. There were easily over 300 of them waiting in line to get in the Uffizi. Strangely, I got in line next to another Occidental looking guy who was the tallest guy in the place. I am amazed to say that I was the second tallest guy in that huge crowd. It was absolutely unbelievable. I felt like an NBA freak. I did actually have one of my strongest urges to have a pick-up basketball game at that moment.
So after a lot of standing around there outside and after getting in a lot pictures that were going to be developed back in Japan, and 12000 Lire we finally got in. But it was worth the effort. All I can say is that those Medicis had some serious good taste and class. Actually, I guess one could say that they sort of helped invent artistic good taste.
Ya, so the Galleria degli Uffizi is a very long building in the shape of a U. My map shows it about 300 meters long and that seems about right. So a round trip including side galleries is no less than 1.5 km. I did that at least 5 times. And that's just one place on one day - inside! Hopefully, I can convincingly begin to convey the fact that I did some big time walking while in Italy.
Anyway, the entire U is lined on both sides with mostly marble sculpture. Quite a huge collection. Most of it renaissance, but some ancient stuff too. I also suspect that there were quite a few renaissance copies of ancient stuff - they had a rather nice Lacoan there, for example. Also, on the ceiling, were murals. The style was relatively consistent throughout the hundreds of murals. Quite incredible and quite a pain in the neck if you studied them like I did.
This brings me to a totally different topic that is relavent to this type of excursion. I had to be very careful to balance two very unpleasant factors - dehydration on one hand, and the inevitable need to use a restroom. Finding a bathroom in Florence was quite a serious challenge and needing to pee every 1/2 hr was not going to make for a fun day. On the other hand, walking non stop for hours and hours and hours takes a certain amount of fluid replacement. So only after a couple of round trips in the Uffizi, I realized that I had to go and they had a bathroom hidden there somewhere. After much bonus walking following bogus signage, I finally found the bathrooms. Actually, I finally found a long line of Asian women. If I spoke Japanese, I think I would have told them that I suspected that Italian women would just default over to the men's room in such a situation. Oh well.
The Uffizi was definitely very high on my list of things to see. Since this was Saturday I was in a big hurry to see the things I wanted to see before Sunday and Monday. Typical museum signs went like this: Open daily except holidays and the 1st and 3rd and 5th Monday of even months that follow non leap years on cloudy days where the pollen count is low.... Every time I'd look at a museum's hours sign I was always left with the questions, "Well, are you open today? Ok, what about tomorrow?" So if you go to Florence for 3 days, go on Tuesday and definitely not Saturday.
The next place that I wanted to see while it was still open was the Bargello. This museum has a large Cellini collection and Cellini is definitely my favorite Renaissance dude. You'll notice that he wasn't one of the Mutant Turtles either.
Anyway, they kicked me out of there at about 13:30 - weird hours - and I was back on the street. And I wandered around. And around and around. The whole town is touristy, so there was always a good chance of running into a herd of Japanese tourists all following a tourguide like sheep to a shepherd. And I think that at least 50% of the coordinates that I occupied in space at any given time were in the line of sight of a tourist's camera. I heard a lot of Americans too. In fact, anyone who looked American usually didn't take long to reveal themselves as one.
Of course, there were Italians there too. I found several things interesting about Italians. First, they're completely crazy on the roads. They all seem to have a moped (hell, maybe several mopeds) and they all drive like a 14 year old Dennis. I really can't believe I didn't see any accidents or people getting hit. I consider myself quite lucky that I personally didn't get hit. They would take these mopeds anywhere they wanted with apparent disregard for signs and stoplights etc. Just because you reach a safe looking pedestrian way (up some stairs, let's say) that doesn't mean some moped is not about to attack you. On the sides of the extremely narrow roads, the mopeds were packed together in a solid wall. When someone wanted to park a moped, they'd hop off theirs and go wiggle two adacent ones apart until theirs fit in between. Crazy.
All of the Italians also seemed to have cellular phones and dark jackets - unrelated I guess. Everywhere, people were carrying on extremely lively conversations (with ample hand gestures) to people that were somewhere else. I've never seen such a rash of that as in Italy. And the dark jacket thing. I realized that I was the ONLY guy in the whole town who had a mostly red jacket. I felt like such a square. I wouldn't mention it if one other person had a red jacket, but I think I saw one bright green jacket and a kid wearing a fancy silvery one, but that was it. Dark grey, dark brown, and mostly black only. I was kind of glad to have a bright red jacket with relflective tape on it considering their moped habits.
Not only were the Japanese tourists short, but the Italians were too. I wasn't exactly the tallest guy on the street, but I was one of them. Anytime I'd see a guy who I thought looked big, when he got near me, I'd see that he was about the same size as me. So I guess I kind of stood out quite starkly. I was a big tall guy (shaking head in disbelief) wearing the brightest jacket in town, with long relatively light colored hair. Standing out like such an Auslander sort of made me a bit nervous at first; I was worried about pickpockets, etc. But after seeing all of those Japanese, I knew that I was an especially bad target to mess with.
I noticed a couple of other things about the Italians too. Some were surprising and some not. In the not surprising, they smoked and they littered. I came up with a good slogan for their tourism promotions to compete with Paris, "Florence - where at least half of the population picks up after their dogs." What I was surprised with was generally how good looking the people were (ya, despite the smoking). The Hollywood mob movies don't tend to impress me with a good looking cast. In reality though, the people were much better looking. I was also surprised at how few people spoke English. In mission critical tourist places, I found some Italian only situations that were a bit surprising. Fortunately, reading Italian isn't completely impossible if you know some of the important bits of a few other languages. I think that Italian would be much easier to learn than French or German, for example.
Ok, after a highly full day of walking around like an ant, I knew that I needed to eat something. The food situation seemed promising on the surface, but there were some problems. All over town were little shops about the size of a Baskin & Robbins. They had long glass display counters just like B&R too. In them were sandwiches, pizza and ice cream. Great, those are 3 of my favorite food groups. So I went in one and pointed to a piece of pizza and a sandwich. They pull your selection from the tray and put it in a toaster oven thing and after you give them a zillion lire, they give it to you. The problem with this arrangement is that it doesn't really heat the stuff up properly and you have to be an extremely hungry guy (like I was) to be happy to eat it. And another thing, the only meat on any of this stuff, and I might add, all of it, was procuitto. I may not be spelling this right, but I don't think I like it and I definitely don't like it on sandwiches and/or pizza. As presented, it was a grizzly tough meat that was about impossible to eat on a half-heated sandwich or pizza. I did appreciate the fact that they had some good cheese on this stuff. Melted provalone or mozzerella on a sandwich or pizza is good stuff so I just pulled out the meat and enjoyed good cheese (not Ementhaler) on pretty good bread.
Ok, but what about the ice cream? Well, I guess these places looked too much like a Baskin&Robbins to live up to my expectations. The ice cream was, I suspect, not cream at all. The places were called gelateria or something like that and I got the idea that the ice "cream" was really just some kind of frozen jello stuff or something like that. It wasn't bad exactly, but it wasn't American ice cream (which does appear to be the absolute best in the world).
So after I was just barely fed enough to not collapse, I did a bunch more wandering around and later in the day, I found a grocery store which was about the size of 1/2 of a typical McD's, including the ones in Florence. I bought some Coke, chocolate, jogurt, and milk for dinner and I headed for the hotel. Unfortunately, they DO have some kind of lower fat milk here and I didn't spend enough time comparing the label on the carton with my internal language dictionary. Only after giving it some thought in the hotel room did I realize that I had bought the fake milk - a shameful vote for evil, cast out of ignorance. Oh well. I was extremely tired after about 12 hours of nonstop wandering around and I was ready to go to bed quite early (and happy to attempt to sleep quite late). In the room next to mine were a couple of Americans that were yacking on and on and on and I could hear them clearly enough to be annoyed, but not clearly enough to join in the conversation. Oh well.
I did manage to sleep extremely well eventually. I got up at a reasonable time so I wouldn't miss the included "breakfast". It was kind of weird that I was the only one there. And breakfast consisted of bread and coffee. I ate lots of bread, but I wasn't going to fall for the coffee trick. And after that, back out on the street. Walk walk walk walk.... On this day, Sunday (Dominico), most things were closed. The trick was to hunt out the things that weren't closed. I did manage to find some neat stuff to do on this day, however.
First, I climbed the Duomo's bell tower. Mariemont's belltower, which is a world class, fantastic bell tower, is pathetic next to this thing. From up there, I could see all over the city. Neat. I went to the Palazzo Vecchio and they were open and uncrowded. They have some fantastic ceiling murals and a good collection of classical marble sculpture.
And I found the Perseus too. It was being restored, but they had a special room in the lower level of the Uffizi that you could go and watch a video about it and then watch them restoring it. I guess the restoreres were on vacation because in 3 days, I didn't see anybody working on it, but it looks better at this point than the other pieces in the Loggia della Signoria. Yes, it's quite a fine piece. I enjoyed seeing Cellini's models in the Bargello too. Oh ya, there's a URL for the Cellini piece: http://www.perseo.org . I thought is was ironic that I had gone to Perseus' home to see him and he had already come to my home.
On Sunday, I was contemplating all of the nice stuff here and its impetus, the family Medici. And I was thinking to myself that a family that had created such a magnificent town would probably put their own chapel and graves in that very same town. So I got the idea that despite not seeing ANY reference to Michelanglo's works on the Medici tombs, they MUST be in Florence somewhere. So I got out my guide book, which is in German, naturally, and studied it more carefully. Ah! there's a Cappelle Medicee. So I navigate my way through the complex maze of twisty streets until I was where it should be. THIS?! I had been there earlier and I just thought it was some random church (of which there seems to be hundreds). The reason I didn't think much of it is not only was there no sign saying "Hey Tourists! Some of Michelangelo's most important work is in here!" but there was a little courtyard behind a fence - this little courtyard was completely littered with broken bottles and trash. Who would suspect that some of the greatest works of art man has ever produced are only 10 meters away.
Interestingly enough, I had seen on Swiss news a report about the ceiling of the Medici chapel falling down. And sure enough, once inside, there was a big scaffolding to catch pieces of gravity charged ceiling.
I didn't spend too long in there - I wasn't to afraid of the ceiling, but the Sunday hours were strange and I got kicked out. I decided that Sunday would be a naturally good day to see some cathedrals. Well, it doesn't work like that. I'd have to wait for Monday as it turns out to get into a church. That's irony.
For food on this day, I found a place that put stuff in a microwave. At first this made me nervous, but it turned out better than the toaster oven places. I had green beans and lasagne and bread - a pretty generic meal really, for only about 13000 lire.
Their money situation is quite out of hand, but I figured out how to deal with it. I just thought of lire as meters and US dollars as miles. So if something cost 20000 lire, that's like 2 10k runs, $12.4 (miles) no problem.
Back at the hotel, I had a quieter evening. I could contemplate the bidet in peace. What the heck is that for anyway? The next morning, I packed up my stuff and took it to the little luggage room, ate some free bread, and checked out. And so began day 3 of walk, walk, walk, walk...By this time, my legs were genuinely sore. Quite sore. I couldn't believe it really. But I had a day to go and I was going to make the most of it.
I did get inside the Duomo and yup, it's a huge church. It's kind of like a hockey rink with a ceiling from a 30000 seat arena, but no seats. I then went to the Casa Buonarroti. This seems a little flakey. It was one of the most expensive admissions, and one of the most questionable collections. It was supposed to be a house where Michelangelo Buonarroti or someone related to him lived (big deal...). There I got to see Mike's shoes (no Nike on them) and some other tidbits. There were some nice relief carvings by Michelangelo, so that made it more worthwhile.
Then I crossed the river and checked out the Palazzo Pitti, a big palace type place. Ironically here the first thing I thought of was George Vanderbilt. He had most certainly seen this place and sent his architects and landscapers to study it when he had the Biltmore in North Carolina built. Of course it was a gibbous moon waning that night with a low tide on the coast of Austrailia, so the place was closed, but because it was a prime number month following a meteor shower in India, the palace gardens were open.
And that was the cheapest admission of the whole town - 4000 lire to get into the Giardino Di Boboli. I'm a big fan of classical garden sculpture and this place had it in spades. So this was definitely the best deal of the town for me. I spent several hours, yup, walking and walking and walking, making sure that I looked behind every hedge and every bush in this huge place. It was kind of like an Easter egg hunt, but they had hidden sculpture everywhere. Very nice.
And finally, I had exhausted possiblities there. I decided to go back to the hotel and make some equipment substitutions. It was actually warming up. The last two days were cold which was a big improvement over the first day which was ridiculously cold. Ok, and so begins the hotel story.
I got back to the hotel and I went in and the lobby was missing. Yes the lobby - it was gone. Where there had been some chairs, and carpets and a desk with a rack of keys behind it etc was gone. It was a big room that was completely empty. I stood there in mild disbelief and some guy (who I hadn't seen before) said in Italian that the door was open (aprire) and he pointed to the little room with my Ortlieb. Hmm. I could see that leaving it here was not a good plan. This was about 1300 and my train left at midnight. I had 11 hours to kill. Hmmm. I then wandered around with my luggage a bit until I realized that I was a bit too tired for that chore. I went to the train station and for 5000 lire, you could leave your stuff in a special place designed for the task. Ok, done. And then more wandering around - this time in time killing mode. I'd go into every bookstore and look at all the books - I didn't want any Italian books, of course, but I was killing time. Wander, wander, wander. Eat some 1/2 cooked pizza. Wander wander wander. Eat some bad chocolate and drink a Coke. Wander wander wander. At about 19:00, everything began to close and wandering got colder and less and less interesting and more and more exhausting. I had originally planned to sit in the now non-existant hotel lobby and read while I waited for my train. I went to the train station and wandered it pretty thoroughly. At about 20:00 I got paranoid about my luggage babysitter quitting for the night and trapping my bag, so I retrieved that. Finally, I decided to wait in one of the waiting rooms where only a few guys were smoking (because smoking is not allowed in there).
At about 21:30, a group of 4 Americans showed up and begin to creatively be obnoxious in an astounding fashion. I think there was a combination of factors at work, arrogance, drunkeness, rudeness, and natural stupidity. I found it charming that in my German grammar book that I was reading when they walked in, one of the sample sentances was "Wer sind diese Dummköpfe?" [Who are these dorks?]. Anyway, they proceeded to act like frat girls in the presence of servants until I could stand it no longer. I felt like getting out my British passport and holding it in front of me apologetically as I headed for the door. I decided that I could handle sitting outside in the cold easier than being around those wankers.
And as my train pulled away I was breathing a huge sigh of relief that they were not in my compartment. In fact, I was all alone this time. Very nice. And after a good sleep on the train, I was back in Switzerland and after another train ride, back in Luzern. Let me say right here - those trains run on time like the proverbial Swiss train. They really are good to +/- 5 seconds. Then I got a bus back to Ruswil and some more walking. This is the second time I've tried to walk from Ruswil to Sigigen and this time again, some lady stopped her car to give me a ride. That's so amazing. Anyway, back at the farm. Good milk, good views, good weather (much warmer than Italy), and good people.
So what's missing about my little trip to Italy? I went to see sculpture, right? What about THE sculpture? The most famous piece of classical art in the world...maybe the most famous piece of art in the world. I guess the Mona Lisa in the Louvre is a contender there. Well, I found Michelangelo's Medici tomb carvings after some searching, but I could not find his David. Isn't that silly? Isn't that incredible? Oh sure, I know that it's supposed to be at 58 or possibly 60 via Ricasoli at the Accademia di Belle Arti, but after wandering around that place on 3 separate days, I did not figure out how to see that sculpture. I even wandered around the halls of the art school. I went back on Sunday and Monday several times. I walked all over that neighborhood looking for something that would be a sign of the most famous artwork in history. Nothing. Oh well. I personally, am not a huge fan of that piece. I think that Michelangelo's Bachus in the Bargello is superior, for example. But of course I haven't seen the real thing, so I guess I'm not an authority on it. I did see the copy in the Piazza della Signoria (it's original home). I also saw the millions of stupid touristy copies and images, ick. I guess that it was just closed when I was there. Probably had something to do with the alignment of only the moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo and the score from the last match of the Firenze Football Club.
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| Chris X. Edwards ~ February 1999 |