Venice

Venice is an amazing and ridiculous city. You have to be a special kind of person to live in a place where everywhere you go, you walk or go by boat, and everything is brought in by boat. If you are sick or about to give birth, you need to walk to the one remaining hospital or get the ambulance boat.  If you are rich, you probably have your own boat to take you around, otherwise you get a water taxi or take the public transportation, which you guessed it, is a boat.  If you move houses, you load everything into a boat and you sail over to your new place.

The story that the city is sinking is true, people basically have abandoned the first floors of every building. It's also very expensive to live here, so many people are moving out. The population is down to 57,000 residents, half of what it was 20 years ago. The Islands are slowly becoming tourist and visitor accommodations and soon no one will really live in Venice.

We started our tour today at the Rialto Bridge, which is a grand piece of architecture, and the biggest and oldest bridge in Venice. From there we walked throughout the Rialto Market, with tonnes of fresh vegetables and fish. The Rialto is a very popular part of town, if you ever need to get there, you can follow the signs or the crowds. Maps are pretty useless in Venice as there are so many small streets, canals and bridges.

As you walk around you will see one beautiful building and square after another, including the home of Mark Polo, the Church of Miracles, Scuola Grande di San Marco, Venice's last hospital, which looks like a church from the outside, and the Arch of Paradise.

We then took the requisite Gondola ride, which was part of our tour, but usually costs 80 euros for 30 minutes ($1 = 1.20 euros). If you choose to do this, I would recommend not doing it at Rialto, which is super crowded and a little boring until you get out on to the Grand Canal. There are berths all over town, so I doubt it would be hard to find a nicer spot to launch from. Today we learned that all the Gondolas are privately owned, and the operator has to train for quite a while before he can get a license.  Also, a Gondola can cost upwards of $50,000 to buy.

For lunch we stopped at St. Mark’s Square, where you can sit out in the square and have a nice meal, but it is expensive. If you sit in front of one of the bands, you'll pay a 6 euro cover charge and 20 euros each for a sandwich and a glass of wine. 

After lunch we toured around a couple of very popular tourist sites, Doge's Palace and St. Mark's Basilica. Once again I am super happy we had a guide as we bypassed the line and went straight in. She also offered a lot of interesting stories you might not have gotten by yourself. The Doge for those of you who do not know, was an elected official who oversaw the government, but was only a figure head like the Queen of England. If you wanted to meet with him, you sometimes had to wait weeks outside his office, but it is a pretty nice waiting room.

St. Mark's is still a working church with several services a day. It is worth the tour to see all the amazing tile that decorates the walls. Most of it is gold, so when they turn on the lights the ceiling gleams.

Moving Day - Florence to Venice

Really sad to leave Florence, it is an amazing place. We also had a great hotel that was right in the middle of the action, so it was easy to walk everywhere. But now on to Venice.

The first mistake I made is booking our ticket to the wrong station in Venice, instead of going to the main station, we got off early and had to get a cab into town. Ironically our hotel is only a ten minute walk from the station we should have gotten off at. Nothing a $25 cab ride couldn't fix. 

The next thing you need to know is that most of Venice is inaccessible by car, so you need to take a water taxi if you have a long way to go. You can get an all day pass for the water taxis for 20 euros, which is worth it if you have several places to go. If you don't have too far to go, walking might be a better idea as the taxis are slow and the lines are long.

To get started you should get on a water taxi bound for San Giorgio Maggiore, an island just east of Giudecca. The landing is right in front of the 16th-century Benedictine church that is beautiful inside and for 6 euros you can take an elevator up the bell tower for some amazing views of all of Venice. There is a very ritzy hotel right below the church which made me a little sad when I saw how the super rich live, but it's hard to stay sad, with such an amazing view.

If you can, take the water taxi through the Grand Canal, it's a great city tour for the price of a taxi ride. There are hundreds of beautiful buildings and you will not be disappointed. 

Day three in Florence

Florence is an amazing place, there is a lot of history, but new art, food and culture is flourishing. I would say this is the difference with Rome, which feels stuck in the past, a town content to coast on it's history. That's not to bash Rome, as it is a must see, I just feel a stark difference.  Rome is like New Orleans pre-Katrina, and Florence is post-Katrina, where new restaurants started to pop up, the movie scene taking off and even Preservation Hall has found a new life.

So back to reality, today was wash day, clothes washing that is.  When you are on the road in hotels, you need to find a good place to wash clothes or you will go bankrupt.  Most hotels charge $3 to wash your socks, so before you know it your looking at a $150 laundry bill.  If you do your homework, chances are you'll find a good laundromat where you can wash and dry clothes in an hour or so for around $10.  The only drawback is that when it's 100 degrees outside the laundromat will be hot, but usually they have free wi-fi, so the time passes quickly.

Once we had clean clothes, we headed over to the Mercato Centrale for a little lunch. This is an amazing building that was refurbished a few years ago and has stalls on the first floor and a food court on the second floor.  Really it's the Florence version of a mall, but instead of Hot Dog on a Stick and Orange Julius, they have great pizza and gelato. If you want to shop, you should know the market is closed on Sunday's, but there are plenty of other places in town selling cheap leather goods.

On the way to the mall, we saw some really cool old cars.

Later that afternoon I  did something I thought would be terrible, but turned out to be fun. We went to Florence Fish Kiss and had these little fish eat the dead skin off our feet. I have no idea why they want to do this for us, but these little fish love human feet. It is super ticklish at first, but after 15 minutes, your feet feel nice and smooth.

Before I left, I made a special trip to John Helmer and spent an hour picking out the perfect hat for the trip, then I lugged it over here, taking special care to make sure it didn't get squashed. Turns out I could have gotten the same hat for half the price and saved the travel hassle. There are hat stalls on every corner.

Tonight's restaurant recommendation comes with a warning, Italian's concept of time is quite different from American's. Most restaurants in Italy don't open before 7 pm, and many open at 8 pm.  If you get there at opening, you will be eating with tourists. You'll get a lot of attention at first, but right as you are getting to desert or are ready for the bill, the place will be rocking and you may be sitting for a while, as waiters rush by you taking care of the locals. That said, Cibrèo ristorante is excellent. We went to their cafe next door for a drink until the restaurant opened, then got ushered in for the first seating. There are no menus, one of the waiters will sit with you and take you through the food offerings.  We thought we were being smart by not ordering too much food, but then they brought out a complementary antipasto plate that by itself was an entire meal. Still, the food was amazing, although it is by far the most expensive meal we have had so far. I would say it was overall a great experience, except for the fact that we had to wait more than half an hour for the check, which is easily forgotten on the walk home, as you think about all the great food you just ate.

Day two in Florence

Today was an amazing foodie day. We woke up a little late and had to hustle over to our tour which included the food, wine and gelato of Florence. Our guide was excellent, he pointed out a lot of interesting architectural and cultural points of interest along the way to the foodie stops. 

We started out in small wine shop called Enoteca, on via Borgo la Croce, where the guide had us taste several different kinds of wine. I think this is the first time I had drank wine before noon since college. Meanwhile people were coming in to fill up their wine bottles from the large metal vats for 3 or 4 Euros a liter, an amazing deal for very drinkable wines. Everyone on the tour was surprised to hear we have the same concept in Oregon - love my growler - so far we have only filled our Hydroflasks with water, but we may soon switch to wine.

Next we went to the Sant’Ambrogio market, which is the smaller and less touristy food market in town. Here we learned the difference between several parmesans, prochutios and pecerenos.  We also went to a small restaurant in the market where they served several typical Italian lunch dishes that were all amazing.

After lunch we got to see how gelato is made, and all I can say is the guy we met, was working his but off mixing up fresh ingredients to create new gelatos every day. I have a new respect for the art form. Another tip I heard is don't eat gelato from a shop that has a big mound of gelato, it should be flat in the container, or it's old and recycled.

Here are some interesting things we learned today:

In Florence in the 1400's homosexuality was rampant, with as many as 2/3 of men in Florence engaging in homosexual relations. To curb this the government encouraged prostitution and respectable citizens like the Medici owned the city's bordellos. A special court known as the onesta (office of decency) moderated disputes between prostitutes and bordello owners. 

In the old days if you were a dishonest merchant, maybe you shorted people on their cloth measurement, you could be reported to the authorities who sat up on top of the market. They would come down with their measuring stick, and if yours was short, you would be de-pantsed and your but would be pounded up and down on a circle tile in the public market.

I love modern art, and it turns out there is some amazing modern art in Florence.  We spent the afternoon in the Novecento Museum which was empty, which is a little sad, but great for two people who are sick of crowds. It is a history of art in the 1900's in Florence, and is a response to the challenge laid down after the 1966 flood, that Florence was coasting on it's artistic history and needed to be more respectful of it's modern artists. The 1966 flood damaged a lot of the classic works in town and as they were being restored, artists started asking why no one was paying any attention the present.

And finally a restaurant recommendation: Il Santo Bevitore restaurante is just across the river and the food is amazing.  It opens at 7:30 pm and there was a long line. Thank goodness we had reservations, as it would have been a long wait for a table. The food portions are big, so sharing is in order.

Day one in Florence

Today was tour day in Florence.

We spent the morning touring the city, with the first stop at the Accademia to see the original David, in a city full of Davids. Things I learned about the David: It is a tribute to David who killed Goliath, and was previously depicted with David resting a foot on Goliath's head, so this one was quite a departure. Michelangelo was not the first sculptor to work on the David, two others started on it and abandoned it, because it was too hard to build it to the scale the commission demanded. The marble had been left for over thirty years when Michelangelo began work on it. It was originally built to be outside the Duomo, but was moved inside after 300 years. One of the arms was broken off and shattered; it was restored many years later, so for a while David was an amputee. Someone attacked the David with a hammer in 1991, because he was ordered to by a painting he saw in the Louvre. He was only able to damage some toes on one foot, so now there is a barrier.

The Duomo is an interesting building in that the technology to build a dome as large as the architect scoped was not available when he designed it, but since it would take almost 150 years to build, he figured it was someone else's problem. Brunelleschi is the man that solved that problem, unfortunately he burned his blue prints after he finished the dome, so people are still not sure to this day how he did it.  Make sure you go inside on your tour as you'll get an interesting lesson in telling time. The clock over the door tells you how long it is until sunset, which was more important to people back then than knowing it's 5 pm. The Duomo Baptistery was under restoration, so we were unable to see it.

After lunch we spent the afternoon in the Uffizi Gallery. It is organized chronologically, so you can see how each period influences the next and learn about the birth of Renaissance art. If you have a good guide they will point out the masterpieces of Raphael, da Vinci, and Boticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and ‘Birth of Venus,’ but hopefully you'll also get some interesting color commentary on the Medici and the amazing soap opera that is the family's history. One of my favorite pieces was a painting by Bronzino, 'Portrait of a Dwarf Morgante.' In response to Varchi's challenge that sculpture was nobler than painting. He painted both sides of the dwarf to prove painting could demonstrate the passage of time and many dimensions.

This is one of the few paintings in the Uffizi painted by a women. She was raped by a fellow apprentice painter when she was young and went on to paint a lot of pictures of women decapitating men. Seems like a model of restraint.

This is a wine hole. In the old days there was a small door here and you passed your wineskin or bota bag in along with some money and you got a full bag back.

Last note for the day. If you come here in July and it's 100 degrees every day, the power is going to go out at some point. Hopefully this doesn't happen while you are trying to sleep in a nice cool room. 

Moving Day - Rome to Florence

Today was moving day number one, as we left Rome and headed to Florence.

We are doing our travel by train for the next few moves, so I bought a Eurorail pass in advance and made train reservations on all the major trains. Just know if you go this route, you should get to the train station at least an hour early for your first trip as you need to go to the information office and get it stamped before you can get on the train. This will take 60 seconds, but inevitably you will get stuck behind a family that bought train tickets a year ago and have no receipt and is now being rebooked on a 10 city tour. It is also very hot in the train station which ups the stress level as you watch your departure time grow ever closer.

One of the great things about Eurorail is that the tickets are for first class, which makes the train a little more bearable, despite the marginal a/c. I think I am making this sound worse than it was, mainly because I thought I lost the tickets as the train was leaving the station and I had a minor melt down. Turns out they were still with me and after some breathing exercises I was back to normal.

The train to Florence was great, left on time and arrived early. The train station in Florence is nicer than the one in Rome, which we began to see was a trend. It was a happy accident, but I am very glad we went to Rome before Florence, it is a lot nicer, cleaner and more fashionable city.

Once we arrived, we took a cab to our hotel, the San Firenze Suites. It is right in the middle of all the action and the room is big with a great bathroom. It is an easy walk to all the attractions, but for the first walk we went across the river to  Piazzale Michelangelo. It is a bit of a hike up several flights of stairs in the heat, but the view is amazing, you can see all of Florence and there is a one of several copies of the famous David statue up there.

One thing I discovered along the way is that artists like to decorate traffic signs in Italy, if I can ever get my pictures to post (having some technical difficulties) I will add the ones I have found so far.

For dinner we went to the restaurante at Cucina Torcicoda; they have three places to eat there and the restaurant is the most high end. It came highly recommended and lived up to the billing. More expensive than the places we ate in Rome, but still very good.

The View of Florence