Italy Travel Journal, May 2000

k e v i n . g i l p i n @ a l u m . m i t . e d u

Sunday May 21

The Metro

We are staying at the Hotel Romae. It is near the Terminale train station and it caters to English speakers, which is nice. We crash straight away until about 4, then we wake and eat a bit, and shower. We are up for a small adventure, so we decide to take the subway (Metro) to the Spanish Steps. The subway is under the Terminale train station. The tickets come from machines which most people are having trouble using. 1/3 of them are broken, and another 1/3 only take coins, which doesn't help much. You can get the machine to give you directions in English, but the substance of the directions is 'of these 3 (sometimes 6) buttons, labeled only in Italian, push the one that will do what you want'. Karen catches on to the fact that the choices are 'single ticket', 'day pass', or 'weekly pass'. That gets us on our way. When we get to the Spagna station, we take several hundred yards of moving staircases and escalators, which makes me wonder why they didn't put the station where the people have to go.

Villa Borghese, Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain

We come out in the middle of the Villa Borghese, which is a big park. We walk in the right general direction for a while, past the horse-jumping area (no horses are about), then get some directions and before long there are other people around. That is progress. Now is when we start to learn about bad maps of Italy. Given that most of the buildings and roads are hundreds of years old, plus the Italian tradition of great artists and navigators, you would expect that they would have the place pretty well mapped out by now but that does not appear to be the case. We are never able to make more than 1 or 2 turns in Rome or Florence without going back to the maps. It sometimes helps to use several at once, plus you can use landmarks and the orientation of the sun. At least there are a lot of landmarks. We come to a large church and spend about 5 minutes with the maps trying to figure out where we are and where to go next, until we notice that over the wall is a large staircase and indeed a large sign which reads 'Scalinata di Spagne'. There is also an entrance to the Spagne Metro stop here; I guess we could have come out right here if we'd known how to navigate when we were down there. We go down the steps, take a 'Where's Waldo' picture, and head for the Trevi Fountain.

Monday

Breakfast reminds me of breakfast in France : it looks like the breakfast I'm used to, but everything is slightly different. The OJ is a bit funny, the milk is whole, the yogurt is a bit less sweet (which is actually nice). It's all pretty good, but you see it and expect it'll be grounding, just like home, and it's not.

To Florence

Today we take the train from Rome to Florence. We start out by semi-accident in lovely first class, then get booted to second class. There we spend most of the remainder of the 3+ hour trip (train was 50 minutes longer than scheduled) standing.

We arrive in Florence and cab to our hotel, Albergo Firenze. We have a nice enough room with a bath and good bed for 240K lire. Our bed at the Hotel Romae was super-hard, so hard that I had a dream that I was sleeping on miniature bookcases. I also had a dream that I was skiing and Dave kept optimizing his way around the moguls. Karen told me in the middle of that night that the way to steal was to always take 2 items, because then no one would suspect you. She couldn't quite reconstruct that logic in the morning.

The staff here seemed gruff over the phone when I made the reservation, and they continue to be so in person. They don't seem to much like running an overpriced hotel in central Florence.

Lunch

For lunch we go to Caffe Caruso, which does not turn out to be like our guidebook described it. We expected a quick self-service lunch, but in actuality it is sit-down with the multiple courses and everything. We ordered skimpily and didn't stay long after eating. Our waitress kept asking us if we wanted water 'with glass' or 'naturale'; we settled on naturale, and then figured out that 'glass' is actually 'gas', i.e. bubbles. The Italian word for 'to sparkle' is scintillare, and 'sparkling' is frizzante. I think that either of those would have been more clear, not to mention aesthetic, than 'gas'. The morales of this meal are twofold. First, it's good to have an up-to-date guidebook. Second, if you arrive somewhere and it's not what you wanted, it may be better to go somewhere else rather than to settle.

The Duomo

We then zip over to the Duomo, with the intention of climbing up inside the dome. We figure the dome might not be too crowded because of the 463 steps involved. We briefly tour the inside of the cathedral, and then find the dome-climbing line.

It is longer than we had expected, but we are on our way up before long. We feel like our marathon training is coming in handy as we have no trouble talking and climbing. The most remarkable thing about climbing the dome for me is the sheer altitude of it; I don't know how they managed to build it such a long time ago. The Duomo predates the discovery of America, and the life of Michelangelo (who lived from the mid-15th century to the mid-16th). I get a good dose of vertigo when we come out below the frescoed ceiling, at least 100 feet above the floor of the church. I don't know how they managed to build and decorate the church. I guess it did take a very long time to build. People had so much patience for that sort of achievement in those days. Today Brunescelli would have quit after 2 years once someone else bought him off with more stock options. The ceiling is decorated with lots of saints and holy figures on the top 2/3 of the dome, and with devils and demons inflicting various sorts of excruciating and disfiguring punishments on the bottom 1/3. It seems wrong to me that the saints can just stand by while devils are stabbing burning pokers into people's butts and peeling off their leg skin. I guess I don't have the proper background for it. It does jive well with the fact that Savonarola was tortured, hanged, and then burned, rather than receiving just one death sentance, or perhaps even a light torturing and banishment.

It is very satisfying to find that you can climb all the way up to the tip-top of the dome, and of course the view of the city and surrounding coutryside from there is great. We see a jet plane flying below us on its approach to the airport.

Gelato : Festival del Gelato

Then we are tired. After a short rest, we head for Fesival of Gelato, which offers about 50 flavors of gelato and mousse. In my opinion, it isn't too far off some of the richer B&J flavors. But only Karen can do it justice with a description. She has senses that I just don't, like one that tells her that her hair is feeling 'greasy and heavy'. As I sat down to write this at the end of the day, her head-sense triggered a shower, which she has just emerged from.

Dinner : Borgo Antico

We have dinner at Borgo Antico, in the Oltrarno. We try to go to Buca della Orafo, which Adam recommended, but it is closed today (later we think that we may have just been too early). Borgo Antico is a lively outdoor trattoria in the Piazza de Santa Spirito, serving mostly pizza with some more expensive specials. We are seated outside in between a group of two American men and another of three Italian women. The Americans are from San Antonio, and they give us some enthusiastic recommendations on things to do in Rome. These include : the Pantheon, and Saint Peter in Chains (which has Michelangelo's Moses). Moses has horns on his head, which may have been Michelangelo's jab at Pope Pious (they had a turbulent relationship), or perhaps an error in translation of the Bible from Hebrew, which describes rays emanating from Moses' head. Also, if you look at the profile of the hair under Moses lower lip, there is supposed to be a little self-profile of Michelangelo. They also recommended the Hotel Elite (12 v. Scala, tel. 055-213-832) as a decent place to stay in Florence. They finish and head out, and are replaced by a mother and daughter. The daughter is American, and as far as we can tell she also speaks perfect Italian. The mother speaks Italian to her, but accented English to the waitress, whose English is spotty. There are languages going every which way. The chianti, pizza, and calzones are yummy. The only negative is all the smoking from the 3 meat-loving women next to us. On the way home we stop for few minutes and watch a guy eat fire, walk across a fiery rope, and wriggle around in broken glass with people standing on him. There's a big crowd; he must have spent quite a while building it up. We go to bed with the intention of waking up early to go see the David.

Tuesday

The David

Our early rising is successful, but only because Karen takes great pains to keep herself awake after the alarm goes off and keeps constantly prodding me. We are tired at 7:30 after turning in at 11:30 the night before, but we get going pretty well. It's a short walk over to the Galleria dell'Academia, where the David is (and not much else). The plaza by the Duomo is pretty quiet; there are only 50 or 100 people there. When we come back around noon there will be thousands, and the line to get into the church will be long. Tour guides float around in the crowd like bouys, waving their flags on poles so that their little followers don't get lost. At the back of a tour on the move there are usually a few people pretending not to be part of it, and a few husbands pulling their lagging wives along. The line at the Galleria isn't too long; we arrive 15 minutes before opening. I expect that when it opens we will all stream in, but that doesn't happen. In fact there are 3 lines to get in : appointments, reservations, and walk-ins. The Appointments just show up at the door at their appointed time and walk right in. The Reservations, which includes a lot of tours, have a line but they get in with priority. Only 10 or 20 Walk-ins get in at a time, every 5 or 10 minutes. Some people are jumping the line. A couple gets in 10 yards ahead of us, and a small group tries to cut in right in front of Karen and me, but I send them packing. The Walk-ins ahead of us are American, and we listen to them talk about Sienna. It sounds nice but I don't know if we'll be making the trip. It is nice to be somewhere we want to be and not have to go anywhere else. They do describe a free wine bar that sounds nice; guests stick out their empty glasses and a corps of bartenders works to fill them. It takes us over an hour to get in; next time we will at least be Reservations; I think it's the same deal at the Uffuzi.

The first interesting things in the museum are Michelangelo's unfinished slaves. I think I remember reading that he worked on them in Rome for Pope Julius but never got them done. It's neat to see some parts looking fairly complete (though not polished), and other parts very roughly chipped away. The stone looks so tough. Michelangelo was a strong man to bash away all those unwanted bits. I can imagine how he looked after a long day at the office, covered in fine marble dust.

There is a problem with all the photos that you can buy of the David : they don't have any people in them that you can use to judge its size. It is damn big. It's feet are 4 or 5 feet off the floor, and the statue itself must be 15 feet tall, so the total thing is 2 stories high. David is famous for its accurate physiology, among other things of course, which you can understand when you see it next to other sculptures. Michelangelo felt that he had to dissect the human body in order to be able to accurately sculpt it, and according to The Agony and the Ecstasy, Fra Angelico (I think?) let him sneak into the monestary hospital's morgue and do just that. Michelangelo knew that Leonardo must have done something similar when he saw the accuracy of his drawings. Anyway, seeing the David makes me appreciate why Michelangelo liked to do naked men : there is so much interesting detail in the physique. Since they didn't have female body builders back then, I can understand why he wasn't so keen on doing women, or people in clothes.

Lunch : Il Fornaio

It is hard to leave the David behind, but we are pretty hungry and getting a little crabby. It takes us a while to find, but we are able to locate a bakery that our sister-in-law Tammy recommended to us. She lived in Florence going to college here and studying Italian. It is called Il Fornaio ('The Baker') on via Faenza. We get some nice bread-y sandwich things--schiaccata con pomodora for Karen, and also a cannoli alla cioccolatte which turns out to be a big chocolate pudding tube. It's all good; a bit rich for our American bellies though.

By now it's lunchtime and we retire to the hotel to plan the rest of our stay here. Tonight is our last night in this hotel. The lady at the desk is crabby to us when we ask about the phone usage and charges; she was crabby yesterday too. We will be more than happy to leave her behind.

Santa Croce

We spend a bit of time looking for lodging. The best we can do is a 'maybe' at Hotel Elite. We will have to call back later in the afternoon. So we table that project and head for the Santa Croce, which was Tammy's favorite piazza and church.

Most of the plaza is taken up by a big makeshift stadium, with the center area covered with dirt or grass. It probably has to do with Catholic-Fest 2000. Perhaps they will be re-enacting favorite martyrdoms, or Christian victories over the pagans. I really can't figure out what they need a dirt surface for.

The only open door to Santa Croce is marked Uscita ('Exit'), so we walk all the way around it looking for an entrance. We are fortunate to get the opportunity to make this journey, otherwise we might not have fully appreciated the fact that Santa Croce is the largest Franciscan church in the world. The way to enter is in fact to go in the Uscita and then take a right. We scoot in with a school tour group and get hustled past the toll collector by their group leader who confuses us for teenagers in his flock. We spend our savings in the gift shop later on. The chuch contains the tombs of many famous Florentines (they were all Catholic), including Michelangelo, Dante, and Machiavelli. Most of the information is in Italian, so we get most of our data from evesdropping on tours. We forgot to bring coins for the fresco-illuminating vending machines, but enough other people use them to give us good looks. Look for the horse that is leaning out to smooch the baby Jesus. We encounter a tour group of priests. For them it must be like going to the Hall of Fame. With 2000 seasons played thus far, it's really getting tough to get in. Plus, the 2 best and most famous stars of all time, Jesus and Mary, are already retired (Jesus went into management). It would be tough for me to be in a career in which absolute mastery has already been defined, by someone else, thousands of years ago. That is probably just my big youthful head talking, and in time I will come to understand the comforting value of humility.

Gelato : Vivoli

It is time for gelato again, and not coincidentally we are in the vicinity of Vivoli (V. Isole d. Stinche 74), the most famous gelatteria in the world. One of our tour books suggests that they may be coasting a bit on their reputation, and though we enjoyed it we would have to agree. Some of the gelato flavors leave a fatty film on the inside of your mouth long after the bite has been swallowed. So far Festivale del Gelato reigns supreme (and it was a bit cheaper), so we'll definitely be heading back there again before leaving Florence.

A New Hotel

Bad news on our hotel situation. In desparation we even ask if our current hotel (Albergo Firenze) has any vacancies for the next two days, but they do not. I guess their crabbiness will not be punished. And our possibility of staying at Hotel Elite falls through too. The proprieter recommends that we try Hotel Nizza (055 2396897) and Hotel Primavera (055 287072). Fortunately, Primavera comes through for us. There, that wasn't so bad. Hope we like it. Karen tells me, in seriousness, that I have to call about the symphony tonight because I am so good at saying 'Hello, do you speak English?' (Boun(a) giorno/sera/notte, parla inglese?) on the phone. I let her know that the nice donna at Hotel Nizza was quite proud of me for knowing that primavera means 'spring' (the season, not the spaniel, or the flowing water).

Dinner : Buca della Orafo

Tonight we are going to try Buca della Orafo again. We arrive at 7:15; the lights are on and the owner is about, but there are no customers. He tells us to come back at 7:30, so we go next door for a drink. I try the local beer. It's OK. Karen has a super-strong iced coffee drink that comes in a tall flute-like glass. I bet that it will pep her up a bit, and it does. When we get back to the restaurant, it is totally full. Oops, guess we should have made a reservation. There are actually two older men, presumably the owners, working inside the restaurant. They seem very busy and very serious about their restaurant. One of them tells us to come back between 9 and 9:15 and he'll work us in, which leaves us with about an hour to kill. Being out and about with nothing in particular to do, Karen's eyes start to pick up on all the window shopping. Most of the stores have nice bright displays even when they are closed. There are so many police around that I don't think the stores have much to worry about. Each piazza has at least a few polizia or carabinari (by the way, what's the difference) vehicles. Still, it's pretty remarkable to see a jewelry store that leaves all their gold and gems sitting in the window after hours.

I think the clothes are the best part. Everything is fashionable, with styles and prices ranging from simple and economical to absurd and, well, absurd. It is quite clear to me why I am not a fashionable person: you could spend your whole life trying to keep up with the style. This year, for example, all the shoes have square toes. All your round- and pointy-toed shoes : forget about it. They are so out. Get right out there and get all new shoes. Now for me that might mean just 3 or 4 pairs, but what about poor Karen? We would have a hard time physically transporting that many new shoes home with us.

Karen doesn't want to get back to the restaurant until 9:15, just to be on the safe side, but my feet wear out and my belly is empty so after a bit of discussion we show up at 9:05. We wait on the stairs for 5 minutes or so. Like Borgo Antico, tables are mostly shared by strangers and we fit in next to another couple. The waiters bustle about in a very Italian-waiterly manner, and it's a bit intimidating. It looks like the kind of place where everyone orders 'the ususal', and I decide right away that I will not be working on my Italian here. The two waiter/owners look very much alike. The one who will be ours comes by quite soon to see what we would like, but we are in the process of discovering that our English-Italian dictionary is useless in Tuscan restaurants and we ask for more time. In a minute, he comes by with the bread and drops it off on our table while looking ahead to his next task. That is the way that all the deliveries take place; service with a 'movin' right along'. We puzzle through the menu for a bit longer, and he comes back to announce 'Now I will wait for 2 hours for you to order'. It is our first sign that he is actually very personable and endearing; his visits to the table will prove to be the highlight of the dinner. Having made little progress on the menu, we let him order for us with his only instructions being 'no meat' for Karen and 'bring delicious beef, and lots of it' for me. I had tried to work out how to say 'I would like a traditional Tuscan dinner' in Italian (Voglio una cena tradizionala tuscana), but I am far too chicken to try it. Our meals come out right away, which leads me to believe that they leverage the charm of the watiers to reduce the load on the kitchen. The food is great, so that's allright by me. The waiter has taken a great liking to Karen, and he refers to her first as la mia donna (donna = 'woman'), then la mia figlia (figlia = 'daughter'), and finally la mia moglie (moglie = 'wife'), at which point I am compelled to let him know that I know several hundred Italian phrases, including 'she is my wife'. Due to service movin' right along, I don't know if he hears that though; I think so, because he is more jovial than ever the next time he comes back. As we are thinking about whether to get dessert, we hear another table ask him what the dessert is as he walks away after dropping some off. 'It's the best thing ever', he says without turning around, and zips off into the kitchen, muttering in Italian. We weren't really planning to get dessert, but you can't pass up the best thing ever. It makes a great end to the night, and he charms us right out the door by asking us if it's our honeymoon and telling us how young we look. I'll bet he says that to all the girls :-)

Wednesday

Wednesday, which is quite a bit less manic than Tuesday.

Change of Venue

We are both pretty wiped out, especially Karen who is feeling a jet-lag aftershock, so we plan to sleep in. The morning is consumed by a leisurely wake-up, and a change of hotels. We are now at Hotel Primavera. It's 50% cheaper, though farther from the town center and with no elevator. It's worth the tradeoff, because here they don't take a steady traffic of fattened tourists for granted. The have to work a bit to keep us happy. The proprieter here is extremely nice and friendly. The Nerd Museum In the afternoon, we decide to check out the scene at the Uffizi in preparation for tomorrow's attempt at the summit, and while we're there we'll go to the Museo di Storia della Scienza, aka the History of Science Museum, aka the Nerd Museum, which is right next door. There are many stunned tourists staring at the Uffizi, because it is closed for the afternoon. There is a NATO conference in town; the Uffizi's closing may be related. A Mafia car bomb blew up a substantial piece of the Uffizi in 1993 and authorities may be worried that someone else might try something similar. Not a big deal for us; we walk next door to the Nerd Museum, which turns out to be free because it's Culture Week. Why this is the only free place we've found thus far, or it's the first we've heard of Culture Week, I have no idea. Maybe the ticket-lady liked my pronunciation of due and decided to give us a break. The Nerd Museum is very well organized and has amazing stuff. All the exhibit tags are in Italian, but they have big guide booklets in many languages freely available. Most of the exhibits are antique precision scientific tools, many of which are too antiquated to be in use any more. Among the most notable exhibits are some of Galileo's original telescopes, his index finger (cut off his dead body; how that happened needs more explanation in my opinion. Was it the museum curator's idea?), wax models of everthing that can go wrong when a baby is coming out and what to do about it (including removing the baby's body from it's stubbonly stuck head), and some amazing glass chemist's apparati that are as much art as instrument. On the way out, we encounter a big marble dial that used to be a public temperature and humidity guage until someone decided that it wasn't aesthetic enough and had it scrapped. The Nerd Museum curator rescued it and put up a note describing its history and offering it up in remembrance of 'a time when art and science could happily coexist side by side'. So don't tell him what's art. If marble is art, then a marble sculpture that tells the temperature and humidity is definitely art too.

Piazzale Michelangelo

When we emerge back into the crowds who have been denied their Uffizi, we both feel the urge to get away and we decide to head for the Piazzale Michelangelo. He used climb up there to recharge his batteries and make life decisions. I think it's necessary to actually make the mile-long journey and several-hundred foot climb like we do. I don't think that riding up in a tour bus has the same effect. Most everyone who came up in one spends most of their time getting their group photo with their back to the breathtaking view of the city, and admiring a dirty copy of the David (again, with backs to the view). I don't make any life-decision breakthoughs, but Karen and I really do have a great time with the trip there and back. There are artists there painting classy souvenirs, but we don't know how we can get anything home without damaging it. On the way back down, we notice a sign inside a small triangular grove which is populated with very small dog houses. Some examination of the sign reveals that the grove is a cat preserve, and further examination reveals the presence of cats. I guess the city is taking over their natural habitat and this it the city's way of giving something back to the cat community.

Dinner : Trattoria I Raddi

Dinner is on the way back to the hotel, at Tratorria I Raddi in the Oltrarno. We have very friendly waiters (a pretty common occurance, but these were especially nice) and the food is excellent too. So far, eating in Italy is better for me than for Karen, actually, because meat is often their best specialty and she only eats sea creatures. Maybe she'll break down and eat a little meat, like Hawaii won her over to fish. Quite a few Italian restaurants, including this one, like to rock the clientele while they eat with dance music and Amercian 80s. In I Raddi, the music is pounding out of the kitchen; Karen thinks that the music is our young waiter's influence, because the cooks come out of the kitchen occasionally to take breaks and they don't look like Dr. Dre fans.

Thursday

Thursday is a sick day. I wake up with a pretty bad sore throat. We wait until 8:30 for the Uffizi reservation office to open and make the call, but there are no slots left until Friday afternoon. We may not make it there this visit, because a 2 1/2 hour line does not sound appealing to me right now. Maybe if I wake up tomorrow feeling a lot better. We have a nice simple breakfast at the Primavera, and then head out to try to have a little fun.

Jacket Shopping

With a bit of searching, we manage to re-locate a leather jacket that Karen had really liked when we were window shopping. The store is called 'Noi' (via Delle Terme, 8, Firenze), and the salesman/owner is very personable and seems knowledgable. It's so hard to shop in foreign countries, but this place seems reputable to me. We looked around at the leather products in the street markets, and it seems clear that this stuff is much better. The jacket looks good on Karen; I think she will buy it, but first she wants to shop around a bit and consider the purchase. I tell the owner that Karen is a careful shopper; he already knows it.

A Slow Afternoon

We stop at a cafe that makes made-to-order sandwiches. We like them quite well, and then head home for a nap. When we wake up there is time for one activity. We pick the Chiesa di Ognissanti, because it's near the hotel and has a Ghiarlandaio master fresco. Unfortunately, that part of the church is closed, but it is quite nice regardless. We haven't been in too many churches yet to be all Jesus-ed out, though we are approaching that threshold by the time we go. The Ognissanti is across the street from 2 5-star hotels, which appear to be hosting the representatives that are attending the NATO conference.

Dinner : Baccus

We choose to satisfy Karen's pizza craving at Baccus, a nearby restaurant with outdoor tables that provide some shelter from the house beats coming from inside. Our table is right next to another couple's. We meet them when Karen finds great humor in the husband's offer to 'shovel' some of his first course onto his wife's plate, and her suggestion that perhaps he would like to 'place' it instead. They are from Dallas, making their way to Assisi for some of the husband's business. His company is putting on a play there for which they have constructed a custom theater. Apparently, that was done for 'Cats', too; I didn't know that. He is a big hockey fan, which brings Karen to mention the Kansas City Blades game we went to that had the Famous Chicken, formerly the San Diego Chicken, now a freelance chicken. One of the Chicken's trademark acts is to beat up Barney; it just so happens that Barney is another business interest of our table-mate's employer, and he has all kinds of interesting details for us. He told us that his company took legal action against the Chicken after getting lots of mail from angry parents whose tots had been disturbed at the sight of seeing their favorite imaginary friend getting the crap beaten out of him down on the field/rink/court. I don't know how the law works in that case, but the judge ruled 'The Chicken wins', and the beatings continue. They were more successful in stopping people from making unauthorized Barney costumes, for clowns to wear at birthday parties and whatnot. For a while they were allowing licensees to make Barney costumes, but then a pedophile was caught in one and that was the end of that. His stories gave me a little more sympathy for what it's like to be a big target in today's litigous world. And as far as I know, Barney is pretty harmless; I don't think they use him to sell french fries and fatty burgers to kids.

Friday

We were hoping that I would feel well enough to make an assault on the Uffizi, but it is not to be. We sleep in a bit and then go down for another nice breakfast at the hotel. We'll be going back to Rome today on the 3:55 Eurostar, so we pack up and check out. Then we head back into the madness to get in a little shopping and sightseeing. Karen has been turning her jacket purchase over in her head, and she decides to go for it. It is in fact very sharp looking; I think that she'll really like it. The shop gives us a cloth bag to carry it home in, and throws in a silk scarf for free; our total cost is about $170, some of which is VAT and should be refundable at the airport. We also duck into Benetton for a quick purchase. The last I'd heard of Benetton in the US was back in the 80s, but it is going very strong in Italy. There must be 4 or 5 Benetton stores in Florence alone. I must say that a woman looks better coming out of Benetton than she ever will coming out of a Gap.

We grab a quick sandwich outside of some kind of courthouse building. There is a guard with a bulletproof vest and a submachine gun that Karen wants a picture of, but she doesn't want to ask permission. It seems to me that it would be a good idea to ask before snapping pictures of the courthouse security. Unfortunately we don't get to test my theory because the picture doesn't get taken.

Museo del Bargello

The Museo del Bargello is primarily a museum of sculpture. They are known for having a some Michelangelo (including Baccus and a bust of Brutus), and a lot of Donatello. I like this place quite a bit because viewing sculpture is interactive and full of surprises, and because there are lots of non-Jesus works. One of the ones we like, which I guess is pretty popular because later on we see postcards of it, is a very speedy-looking bronze Mercury. The museum also has lots of ancient jewelry and metalwork of various kinds, including a folding fork-spoon that I think should be revived as a camping utensil.

There is also an arms-and-armour room. The most indimidating thing that I see there are two jousting helmets that look like they would fit Goliath's big brothers. The eye slits on jousting helmets are literally not more than 1/4 inch wide. Is there anything in the modern world that can compare to jousting? Maybe playing 'chicken' in cars, with the following enhancements :

Nope, can't really think of anything that compares to that.

Back to Rome

The museum closes at 1:50, and we have a bit more lunch, write some postcards, and then work our way over to the train station. We have pretty high hopes for the Eurostar, especially considering that I can really use some rest. The train arrives late and very crowded. For a while it looks like Karen won't get a seat, but someone shows her that we actually have assigned seats. She goes and claims it, and though we don't get to ride together we at least get to ride in comfort. Note to the novice Eurostar user : ask about seat assignments.

Rome

We have a great time in Rome with our friends Dave, Christy, and Saleem, but I am not able to keep up my passion for journaling.

Suffice it to say that Rome is even more amazing to me than Florence. Some of the highlights of our visit are:

There are lots of other things that we would have liked to do there. We'll definately be back.

The gelato is better in Florence, though :-)

Pictures from Rome


The Colloseum
Looking down into the Colloseum
Dave and Christy sharing a moment
Dave marching

Ruining the forum just a little bit more
The girl is walking on the original Roman street. The doorway, 20-odd feet higher, was built at ground-level when the temple was converted into a Christian church.
A view of the ruins of the Forum and surrounding buildings
Inside St Peter's

One of the many amazing ceilings in the Vatican
Doesn't it look like there is a camera in this ceiling fresco?
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