A visit to Firenze

When Italians elsewhere in this country hear that we live part-time in Fidenza, they often mishear (not surprising, given our non-native accents) and think we've said "Firenze." And they nod and smile; of course, where else would people from glamorous California want to be when they're in Italy? And when we correct them and say, more clearly, "No, no, Fidenza," their smiles often fade. "Fidenza? But why?" is a not untypical response.

Firenze--Florence to us English-speakers--is indeed an extraordinary city, picturesque beyond all reason, jammed with masterpieces by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and other household names, with stunning landmarks like the Ponte Vecchio and the famous Brunelleschi dome on every side. But the last time we visited, during a September some years ago, we swore we'd never return. The city was jammed with tourists and people trying to sell them David mugs and Botticelli scarves. We struggled along narrow streets on the city's pitifully narrow sidewalks, barely wide enough for single file, while cars, trucks, and buses ground by inches from our elbows. The lines to see the famous attractions were long, the restaurants mostly overpriced and underwhelming.

In every one of these respects Fidenza is the exact opposite of Firenze, which is one reason we love it. Thank god we have no attractions noteworthy enough for thousands of people to line up for. 

However, having mellowed somewhat with age, and realizing that Florence is only a couple of hours away by train, we decided it was time to give the birthplace of the Renaissance another chance. So last week we met up there with our friend Valerie for a mid-week excursion of a couple of days.

Probably COVID gets much of the credit for how much we enjoyed Florence this time around. The city was hardly deserted, but the line for the Uffizi was only minutes long, rather than hours, and many other things we wanted to see had no lines at all. Moreover, most of the tourists seemed to be Italian or French. If they were saying the kinds of idiotic things that tourists are often guilty of, we were spared understanding them, and hopefully they couldn't understand the stupidities we were uttering either.

My responsibilities as a blogger didn't occur to me until several days after we got back, so if you're hoping for photos of gorgeous Florentine scenery you will have to go elsewhere. But I'll do my best with the few photos I randomly took.

The first nice thing about the trip was that we could make the 125-mile trip by train. A "fast regional" train took about an hour and ten minutes to get us from Fidenza to the Bologna station. There we caught a high-speed train that covered an equal distance twice as fast. 

The "Red Arrow" train arrives in Bologna

Our total travel time of 2 hours and 25 minutes was less than it would have taken to make the trip by car, as well as considerably more pleasant. We agreed that these genuinely fast trains (up to 300 kilometers, or 186 miles, per hour) are vastly preferable to air travel: you only need to get there about 15 minutes ahead of departure, and there's no stripping for security, just a quick Green Pass check. It's shocking that high-speed trains are one of the many features of advanced civilization that the U.S. is too primitive to provide. 

Whenever I take a train here I'm surprised by how lackadaiscal they are about checking tickets. Going back and forth to Parma, I've hardly ever had anyone ask to see if I've actually paid for the trip. Even on these more expensive trains (our round-trip tickets were about $70 each) we saw a conductor only on the Bologna-to-Firenze stretch. I gather the fines for traveling without a ticket are stiff, but I wonder how many people less risk-averse than we are just take their chances.

We stayed in a nice three-star hotel (the Hotel Alba Palace) that Danny found on the internet. It was just ten minutes by foot from the Firenze train station and not much more to places we wanted to visit. Our first stop after we arrived and dropped off our bags was the Uffizi, which none of us had been to in decades because of the lines and crowds. We hadn't bothered to reserve tickets, since we'd heard there weren't many tourists, but we only had to wait about 15 minutes to get in. Once admitted, however, we were sent through a nearly endless labyrinth of windowless corridors and myriad flights of stairs--temporary measures put up, I assume, for anti-COVID traffic control--before we finally emerged into the museum proper. We didn't have it all to ourselves by any means, but we also didn't have to elbow dozens of people aside to see the pictures and read the labels. So I shouldn't complain. But the density of masterpieces was its own kind of oppressive. Room after room after room of exquisite things...it was exhausting. Even the ceilings were astounding.

Danny's bad hip had gotten too much of a workout, so he left early to go back to the hotel and give it a rest. Valerie and I soldiered on, but I took photos of a few pictures to make Danny feel bad about what he was missing, including a very nice Michelangelo:

Unfortunately there was no explanation of who the little whackamoles on the frame are.

and a couple of Caravaggios, including his "Sacrifice of Isaac," which I don't remember seeing before:

Valerie and I stopped for a snack at the rooftop cafe, which had a view of the Palazzo Vecchio and the rest of the cityscape to which my photo does absolutely no justice.

Those white things are folded-up umbrellas.

As you can see, we also had perfect weather, much warmer than up north in Fidenza.

The next morning we visited the San Marco monastery, which all three of us had been to fairly recently but were still happy to see again. It was a Dominican monastery lucky enough to have Fra Angelico as one of its inmates, and this awesomely productive monk painted scenes from Christ's Passion in each of the dozens of cells where his fellow inmates lived. 

Compared to other Florentine museums the San Marco is not terribly popular. Nor is it awash in gilding and marble, like the many palazzi that now house the city's various treasures. So when you walk the halls and peer into the cells where the monks lived and prayed beneath Fra Angelico's frescos, you can still imagine their life of silent contemplation of suffering and redemption. To me the little windows in each cell, with their crude wooden covers, evoked that asceticism.

The Medici also commissioned Fra Angelico to make a graphic-novel version of the life of Christ in a series of small, brilliantly detailed panels that originally decorated a big trunk that held hundreds of silver ex voto offerings from the devout. (More images and interesting details are available at this site: http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/fraangelico/armadiodegliargenti.htm.) Here are some of the panels, now on display at the San Marco.

Breathtaking paintings created to glorify a chest stuffed with silver seems very on brand for Florence.

From the San Marco we moved on to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, a recommendation of Pam's. It's a small museum filled with examples of the Florentine art of mosaic using marble and semi-precious stones. This is the kitschier side of the Renaissance, but the workmanship is astonishing and the exhibits showing how it's done made for a pleasant hour. 

That afternoon Valerie and I were heading to the Medici Chapels when we happened on the Medici-Riccardi Palace, a hulking edifice that our all-knowing friend Dana had said was worth a visit. Here the wealth, pomp, and power of Florence, and the Medici family in particular, were on display, culminating in a huge reception hall whose ceiling was frescoed in typical style with dozens of figures in colorful robes posturing gracefully and swirling up toward the heavens. Except this ceiling portrayed not the Virgin Mary's leap into the sky nor Jesus' resurrection, but the apotheosis of the Medici family as the sum of human virtues. The shamelessness of this has its own charm, I guess, and the paintings are wonderful. It's the Renaissance version of our current billionaire assholes sending themselves into space. At least the Medici and the allied Riccardi family left behind lovely things to look at.

And some not so special things, too. Not every painter in Renaissance Florence was a genius, as witness this item from the palazzo's horde. (What's with those noses?) I photographed it for my dog-loving children.

Is there a relevant Bible verse?

What made the visit more than worthwhile, though, was the family chapel. Thanks to COVID, only six people could enter at a time, and getting to see it almost by ourselves was well worth the wait. It's a small space covered with gorgeous frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli depicting the three kings' journey to Bethlehem. With their vivid colors the paintings look like they could have been finished yesterday, but their Renaissance provenance is clear from the fairytale landscape, the plump dumpling-like horses, and the crowds of pungently observed Italian faces. Of all the marvelous things we saw in Florence last week, this was the most marvelous.

Apologies to whoever on the Internet I stole this from.

Then we went on to the Medici Chapels, which are overwhelming in an entirely different way. The Chapel of the Princes, built to house the remains of various Medici, is as bombastic and excessive as Gozzoli's intimate chapel is charming. Every surface in the vast space that isn't gilded or frescoed is covered with inlays of marble and colorful stones. Some are intricate mosaics:

Less delicate expanses of stone cover the floor and walls:

Amid all the vulgarity, poor Jesus on the cross is almost unnoticeable. Ferdinando I de' Medici, at right, is clearly a much more important fellow:

In the chamber above are the famous tombs that Michelangelo designed for yet more Medici. Each of the two sarcophagi is topped by two massive figures representing Day and Night on one, Dawn and Dusk on the other, reportedly a commentary on how time "devours all things," even Medici. (Although not, so far, marbles by Michelangelo.) The kludginess of these figures annoyed me when I first saw them decades ago, and all-devouring time has not yet diminished my dislike. They're massive the way a Stalinist apartment block is, a bullying massiveness expressing anxious self-aggrandizement (or patron-aggrandizement, even worse). And then there are the breasts. Over the years I have been in a lot of locker rooms with a lot of athletic women in a state of undress, and never have I seen anyone with stuck-on titties like Michelangelo gave these ladies. They look like tumors.  

By the time we tottered away from the Medici I had that same overstuffed feeling I get from overeating, only it was my eyes and brain that felt like I'd demanded too much of them. My capacity for enjoying art museums, which used to be nearly bottomless, has shrunk along with my gastrointestinal tract's ability to process large quantities of fat and alcohol. Time may devour all things, but it's leaving me able to devour less and less of them. 

Which I was reminded of after dinner our first night in Florence, at a wonderful traditional place, Ristorante Cafaggi, another of  Dana's recommendations. We had just survived the Uffizi and were in a celebratory mood, so we ordered with abandon: a special Campari-and-prosecco cocktail followed by some fizzy vino bianco, chicken liver crostini (a Florentine specialty), fried artichokes and fried zucchini (ditto), and for me a big dish of trippa alla fiorentina, a stew of book and honeycomb tripe cooked in a tomato-based sauce. It was all wonderful and we enjoyed every mouthful. But later that night I was filled with regret as well as a lot of very rich food, and I vowed to show some restraint the next day.

Somehow I convinced myself that a simple grilled steak would be more or less spa cuisine, so while Danny chastely asked for a salad, Valerie and I ordered up yet another icon of Florentine cucina tipica, a bistecca alla fiorentina. This is a gigantic T-bone steak, cooked rare and served with nothing other than salt, pepper, and a little bread. Valerie and I exclaimed that we'd never be able to eat all this--the steak weighed in at two and a half pounds, including the bone--and then proceeded to do just that, with only a little help from Danny. Strangely, I didn't feel bad afterwards. Perhaps being in Florence was getting me used to excess.

In addition to the sights already mentioned, during our visit we perused the gold and silver jewelry on offer on the Ponte Vecchio, had a drink while admiring the surreally huge and exuberantly decorated Duomo, admired the sunset over the Arno, picked through stalls of "authentic Florentine" leather goods, and strolled through piazzas large and small. And we saw way more paintings, sculptures, and other precious things than it seems possible for one small city to have. 

In its heyday Florence was awash in money, wealth wrung from the misery of the local peasantry and unfortunates farther away, and the Medici and the other elite families couldn't spend it fast enough on building and decorating churches, tombs, palaces, and other tributes to their own importance, while trumpeting their piety and virtue. It's a distasteful spectacle, especially in our new age of extravagant inequality. And yet, and yet...Florence is beautiful and full of beautiful things, and we have those long-ago plutocrats to thank for it. For me that's an uncomfortable tension. So while Firenze was a great place to visit, I'm very glad we don't live there, not even part time.