Florence

September, 1999

Florence is filled with an astonishing number of famous original works of art and architecture. But it is a stunning return to the world of cars after Venice. The buses and scooters are for some reason really loud, much louder than usual so that whenever one goes by conversation has to stop until the vehicle goes another block away. In fact, you often have to yell to talk at all outside. And the scooters dont seem to have catalytic converters - they trail thick cones of foul sooty stink behind them. The sidewalks have been retrofitted from their medieval designs to accommodate cars on the streets, which means that the sidewalks are now about 2 feet wide, not wide enough for 2 people to walk together and definitely too narrow for all the people who want to use them. And cars park on them anyway, so they're often completely blocked. Even the lovely areas around the Duomo, the cathedral, which have, at least according to our books, been designated pedestrian-only areas, have taxis and scooters bargeing down them every few minutes scattering tourists everywhere.

Things are outrageously expensive here; Florence costs even more than Vienna. And so far the food has been less than excellent or not very good. Food costs about twice as much as in Venice. We're trying to be a bit thrifty with our eating, and perhaps that is our problem in Florence. The gelato is wonderful and not terribly expensive, but pizza by the slice, bruschetta (the regional specialty) and the little tramezzini sandwiches in all the bakeries are mostly just not very good and very expensive.

The Bapistery, an octagonal building started in the 7th century and used for many centuries as Florence's great cathedral, is an amazing building. The vast mostly circular interior is completely empty of furniture or walls. You lose track of scale until you see some tiny figure on the other side of the space and realize it's really people-sized.

Every interior surface is carefully decorated. The tile floor is made of brightly colored marble tiles that form various patterns with completely different designs every few yards (most of them completely unrelated to their neighbors. The marble is from different mines in the mountains nearby -- some mines yield green, some white,
some red marble. It has been used to embellish important buildings all over town. In the last century Florence decided to improve the Baptistery's exterior with marble, too, so they covered the old medievel brick with bright marble designs. It is a busy exterior.

After awhile the Florentines got tired of their little cathedral and decided to build a new one more suited to their greater economic and political standing in the world. So the Duomo was built (after quite awhile of figuring out how to actually construct a dome of the size they'd specified.) It is gargantuan and wildly elaborate. The outside is of course completely covered in red white and green marble designs, and the interior is equally embellished though with other materials. We also visited the San Croce church, which is also enormous, but we thought much lovelier.

Galileo, Michaelangelo, Machiavelli and lots of local politicians are buried there. Florence also built a huge magnificent tomb for Dante there, too, but they had previously banished him from the city so he stayed put and they just have a big empty tomb. (They don’t tell you that in any of the church literature, though. They just say they have Dante's tomb.)