Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Firenze!

Susan:

Somehow another week flew by here full of the current usual: daily Italian class for all, other classes for others, group lunches with occasional guests (Gabriele, son of one of the button shop owner-ladies, member of the city council), tour of the city offices and meeting with the mayor (who told us to come see him if we had anything to discuss - okay!), walks to various stores (we signed up for a grocery store shopper card - quite the accomplishment), Jeff cooked dinner for the students a couple times (much appreciated), and before leaving town on Friday we had our second Italian test (stiff competition among the family with Jake in the lead by half a point. Those young brains!).

Friday we grabbed bag lunches after class and headed for Florence via bus to Arezzo and train from there. Interesting note: our temporary hometown of Sansepolcro is a walled city; literally busting out of and beyond the medieval walls built to protect it all these many years ago and last updated in the 15th century I believe. There are a handful of openings in the wall. The one nearest us is Porta Fiorentina, door to Florence (literally, a female Florentine? or it's feminine because it modifies door which is feminine? Oy, back to studying), and at the other end of the main street is Porta Romana, door to, you guessed it, Rome. Off to Florence!

Well, Florence is quite the high achieving change agent it turns out. Birthplace of the Renaissance, home of the Medici family, modern Italian language influencer, and locale of a few well known pieces such as Brunelleschi's Duomo, the Boboli Gardens, Michelangelo's David, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, and da Vinci's Annunciation. If that weren't enough, it also sports more great food, captivatingly beautiful store displays, beautifulllllll leather shoes and bags made in town, lots and lots of tourists and super narrow sidewalks with buses roaring by a couple inches away. All in all, despite the less than great weather, it was pretty cool.

Our meal Saturday night was capped off with a round of limoncello flavored digestifs, on the house, after our waiter/manager was impressed with our two and a half weeks' worth of Italian, which in turn, our Italian teacher was impressed with upon the recounting. He said that had to have been someone from Napoli (the south of Italy), as no one from Florence would do that. Ha! As we well know, countries can have vast regional differences when it comes to culture, habits, dialect, etc., and this one is no different. Funny thing: We chose our Saturday night restaurant based on yelp reviews and it turned out to be as great as promised. The name of it was Pensavo Peggio which our Italian instructor found quite funny, as it translates to 'I thought worse.'

Oh, we stayed in a convent turned hotel. There are still a handful of priests living out their days there, going about their churchly biz, including doing some tremendous bell ringing periodically.

It's not hard when going through multiple museums to become acclimated to the vast amount of artistic perfection you're walking by for hours, but I think we appreciated what we saw a great deal. It's difficult to adequately describe the vast difference between seeing a photo of a sculpture and seeing it in person - looming over you with movement and musculature and emotion.  It really made quite an impression on us all. In the end we didn't see and do everything we wanted to, and hope to make another quick trip there during our time here.

Photos to be added. It's late and we've got theory number 20 to try as to why some photos are sticking around and some aren't.

Ciao!











1 comment:

  1. Another great post.

    Lydia adored Florence and said it was the one part of her trip--which included Athens(!)--that I had to make a point in my life to go visit. Maybe because of my profession I associate Florence with the great Machiavelli, one of the most underrated change agent.

    Yelp. I don't know why that made me smile. Here you visit this classic city of immense history, and you discover your restaurant in this manner. I've never used yelp, so perhaps it seems more advanced to me than it would to others. (We did use tripadvisor for a restaurant in london once--surely the same dealio.)

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