Tuscan Tour: Florence = Kyoto West??
We finally arrived in Florence in mid-evening, a little over a day after leaving Lummi Island, took a taxi to our hotel, checked in, and got a recommendation for a nearby dinner cafe. Around the corner were street musicians with amps, mikes, , he playing the accordion, she singing a range of standards in an operatic style, and under a long covered walkway so the sound echoed across the main square. Found a nice outdoor café down the street, shared a lovely bottle of Chianti Classico Riserva. The food was good. The wine was terrific (about 18Î ). Ahh…we’re here!
Our room is clean and pleasant, the desk staff friendly and helpful. Nrxt morning there is a breakfast buffet set up with many delightful choices. We are up early for our appointment at the Uffizi for 0815, and fortunately it is just around the corner. Second lesson in red tape Italian style (lesson 1 was waiting in a long painfully slow queue for lost baggage claims the night before). In this lesson you go to Uffizi, find the entry door and are told “ah, you have the”appointment?”…si, you must go across the street – see, over there— and get your tickets, and then come back.” Which is a good thing because there is a very long line of tourists from all over the world who do not have appointments and must wait to get in. We are among the first group of visitors for the day so have the luxury of not having to contend with crowds for the first hour or so.
In Uffizi in an hour or two you can follow the unfolding of the Renaissance in art, the evolution from the two-dimensional style to three dimensional perspective, to faces that actually belong to real people of the time. Which also raises the interesting issue of whose faces were in the paintings, who turn out to be either patrons or politicians or clergy, or some combination of all three. So it dawns that all of this wonderful art we have been seeing in pictures and museums and books are not only art as art, but records of the politics of power of the day. Yes, you too can be immortalized in marble or on canvas or wood, with pose and positioning wholly dependent on your place in the pecking order.
Florence is a medieval city in the center of a modern city, and it is an uneasy blend. Since we have been in Italy for awhile as I write this, we have been to many of the medieval, walled hill towns that occupy virtually all of the tallest hills in a rolling landscape that is all hills and valleys. From almost anywhere you can almost always see at least one old walled hilltop city within a few miles. And it is this more or less constant juxtaposition of the modern with the medieval that is the backdrop for everything here. There is no direction you can look that doesn’t have these elements, usually in old stone walls that have been built and repaired and rebuilt and reconsidered over hundreds or even thousands of years. Curiously, this creates a strange balance of wabi-sabi that is reminiscent of Kyoto. “When I’m in Kyoto, I am homesick for Kyoto”…When I am in Tuscany, I am homesick for Tuscany…even though I have never been here before. Or have I…??!!
The blend of the medieval with the modern leads to the strangeness of narrow alleys that are mostly traveled by pedestrians, but also little cars and trucks and a constant stream of motor scooters, some quite plush, with roofs even, whining past in twos and threes at speeds that seem out of all proportion to the situation, which is that they clear the pedestrians by only a foot or so, and each other by less. So this is a city adapted to close quarters and a range of stylistic contradictions.
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2072 Granger Way
Thanks for the updates about your trip. Great tip on the parking at Tulalip!! We’ll have to try that strategy out, too. Missed Pat at Mah Jongg last night, but always good to have Anne back! Can’t wait to hear about the whole trip! C
I am just back to the modern world of the internet, enjoying your accounts of your trip. How different it is from my recent trip to Alaska. Now I will go back to your earlier trip posts. It all sounds wonderful.