Great Expectations

Hi All!

It's been awhile since our last post, and it's now my job to fill you in on what you've missed. So bear with me as I cast my mind back to the days of yore, when we first arrived in Florence...

This city came with extremely, extremely high expectations, at least for me. Many people promised that it would be the most wonderful, romantic, gorgeous city that I had ever seen, that no other city in Europe could compare... And anything that receives that much hype is destined to disappoint in some respects.

For example: we came into the city having successfully located our campsite in multiple foreign locations, we knew that Florence had a simple, single-ticket bus system, and there was a bus route that began at the train station and ended at our campsite. We expected, therefore, to have no problems with our arrival.

These expectations were not met.

We had explicit directions to the exact corner near the station that the bus would stop at, but lo and behold, no stop was to be found. Some further searching located a sign for our bus a good 400 meters away -- unfortunately, the sign did not list the camping stop among the 45-ish destinations of the route. Okay, we told ourselves, no worries, we'll wait until the next one comes and ask the driver. Forty minutes later, with no bus on the horizon and the sun really laying the heat on thick, a miracle occurred: I randomly glanced at the route of a different bus, saw a "Camping" stop, and our tent was set up and ready to go ten minutes later. (Whew.)

We also expected no difficulties locating internet access. Our campsite had none, but we had been told that an excellent chain had sprouted multiple locations around the city, driving the sketchier joints out of business and providing super-easy access for tourists. Unfortunately, they have since gone out of business themselves, leaving a wasteland of abandoned computer terminals sprawling across Florence. (We did manage to find somewhere for Eliza to type up her Rome post, but declined to enter any delicate password information while there...)

The city itself, of course, could never live up to the fairy-tale land that I had created in my mind. Major differences between my imaginary Florence and the real one include the existence of a sewer system, pigeons, garbage cans, and other tourists.

And the art came with quite possibly the highest expectations, as Florence's museums are widely regarded to be some of the best in the world. I anticipated incredible things and occassionally got them (more on that later), but the collections ultimately focus on a very narrow time period, and there are only so many ways that you can marvel at the transition from flat, gilded medieval saints to brightly-colored, realistic, 3D Renaissance work.

That said, several expectations were not only met, but wildly exceeded.

Food, for starters. Okay, we'd been eating in Italy for a week and a half -- it's been wonderful, but there's only so much that one can do with cured meat, pasta, and pizza, right? Wrong! Maybe we just got lucky, maybe the food really is that much better, maybe we were just relieved that nobody tried to swindle us tableside. But as I look back over my notes from those three days, over half of them are spent describing meals and restaurants, talking about the free wine and the variety of cheese (one was made with pistachios!), the olive tapenades and the fresh, flaky bread, the tender beef carpaccio and the creamy tiramisu -- let's just say that if you ever visit, we have plenty of recommendations to send your way.

Also, the sunset. Everybody says that it's mind-boggling, and best viewed from the top of a very steep hill on the Piazzale Michelangelo. But did we really want to hike up 20 minutes worth of stairs just to watch some pretty colors flare over a river? Frankly, no -- but because our campsite was on top of the same hill and there was no way that I was dealing with the bus system again, we didn't have much of a choice. And the one night that this allowed us to catch the show in its entirety was truly spectacular. (I swear that we have pictures to prove it, you just have to wait until we find a way to upload them!)

And finally, David. The David. One of the most famous statues in the world, endlessly photographed, reproduced in every art history book ever, and even cast into multiple copies on display throughout the city. After seeing variations on this guy soooo many times, I truly didn't think I would be that impressed -- but absolutely none of the reproductions comes close to the splendor of the original.

I wish I could tell you exactly why. It was partly the display, at the end of a hall with a glass dome above, designed to filter and reflect natural light over him evenly; partly the size, a towering 17-some-odd feet; partly the backstory of Michelangelo carving him freehand out of a block of flawed marble, rejected by other, more senior sculptors; and partly David himself, the complexity of his expression, the angles of his limbs, the beauty of his pose. But there's something more ephemeral as well, something you can only know by experiencing. All else aside, Florence ranks among the top cities of our trip if only for the forty-five minutes that we spent walking around this single statue.

Other things you should know:

- We continued topping things, climbing 465 stairs to the heights of the Duomo.
- The Boboli Gardens contain an exquisite marble statue of a morbidly obese dwarf riding a turtle.
- McDonald's coffee is just as bad in Europe as it is in the States.
- And Eliza remains unbeatable in cribbage, but I shall never abandon hope.

LOVE TO ALL!