Leaving Florence

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Yes, I know we just got here a couple of days ago but we are leaving tomorrow, Tuesday, rather than next Saturday. We have visited the Duomo -- no; we did _not_ climb the tower, and toured the Piazza Vecchia where I was able to get photos of various Renaissance figures whose work we discuss in 300. It is rather ironic to see a statue of Machiavelli enshrined here and to see both statues and paintings of Dante in the Piazza and Duomo given that both men spent the majority of their lives exiled from Florence. We got into one of the tiny Uffizi galleries but the line up for the larger ones was about 3 hours long yesterday so that experience is going to have to wait for another visit. We have been told that, if we come in January and spend all our time inside galleries, we will have much better luck. I just might try that.

We were dreadfully spoiled by Siena. The entire city supports the art that one sees inside galleries and churches so the experience of being in Siena is far more holistic than being in Florence. We walked through streets that look like the ones in paintings. In fact, the modern clothing, machinery, and artefacts of the 20th C look out of place in Siena whereas Florence has the air of a modern city that happens to have the occasionally interesting site in it. I have seen more adolescent graffiti here than in all the spots we passed through in Rome; the aura of economic decline is pretty strong here and, to be honest, very depressing.

The outside of the Duomo here is beautiful. A cleaning project is under way so the front of the building is a lovely white rather than the dingy grey of the rest of it. Cleaning something that big is a difficult endeavour, calling for miles of scaffolding. The baptistry doors are truly amazing and powerful. They were, indeed, the Bible of the illiterate and retain their rhetorical power even today. The baptistry was not open yesterday so we are hoping it will be today as we would like to see inside.

As far as leather prices go, we did as well as we could have here when we made our purchases in Siena. The market is a gas, reminding me of the Wednesday markets in Honolulu's Aloha Moana Stadium. The only difference is that one buys Hawaiian shirts there and leather here and that the Italian street merchants are some of the biggest flirts in the entire universe. We walked past one stall today that we had passed yesterday and were told the same thing by the same man, that he has a special price on all of his products just for beautiful women. Yeah, sure. I wonder how many of us middle-aged women fall for that line!!

We have figured out the bus system to the point that we can get from A to B without getting lost and are very proud of ourselves for having done so. One tourist couple we met in Siena told us that it is possible to walk around Florence in a day. Yeah, right! Not even Leslie would try that one!! I think they were in Fiesole and thought it was Florence because it has a non-English name that starts with an "F".

The convent we are in is situated on the edge of the city and is very quiet, which is nice. However, it is also a kajillion blocks from anything resembling a store, a cafe, a bar, a fruit or vegetable stand or anything useful for those of us who are trying to maintain some form of a budget. We ended up having to buy dinner at the convent on Sunday because we could not purchase fruit and veggies and cheese anywhere. We have to take 2 buses to get anywhere and, once we are downtown, finding things like post offices is a major event. We were very spoiled in Siena and Rome and, despite enjoying some of the from the Duomo to Ponte Vecchia, are not impressed with Florence. Frankly, I seriously doubt that all the people lining up for all the galleries have a deep love for or knowledge of the things they are seeing. All kinds of groups of tourists were taking pictures of the statue of David in the Piazza Vecchia yesterday, having no idea that the David they were photographing is a copy and that the real one is inside a gallery.

Leslie put it very well today when she said that she now understands why I prefer to focus on the Medieval and the way people sought to situate themselves in relation to eternity rather than the narrowness of focussing on temporality. For all the religious subject matter of the Renaissance art, the main focus was on what humans can do in the world for themselves and by themselves. Being in the middle of the Renaissance is like looking at Western Civilization through the wrong end of a telescope: we can see the beginnings of what we now have and, while we have made much progress in some ways, we have also lost a great deal in what it means to be in human community and why that human community matters.

So, since this is our holiday and not a pre-set list of "shoulds" set down by some divine hand, we are changing our plans and getting out of Dodge, aka, we are leaving Florence tomorrow afternoon, heading for Assisi. We will spend 3 days there before heading back to our lovely Spanish nuns in Rome. I should tell you that Leslie made all the arrangements with both Assisi and Rome, changing days of our arrivals and departures, setting up rooms, etc. and did very well in Italian. I was listening in while she was talking to the nuns in Rome, none of whom speak English, and was very, very impressed.

So, everyone, the next post will either be from Assisi or from Rome, depending on what we find in terms of Internet access in Assisi. One good thing about everything here being so far away from where we are staying is that we could not and did not find an Internet cafe until today so you were all spared a long blurb about our first impressions of Florence which were "What on earth have we done?!" Those impressions have softened and we are no longer banging our heads against walls and sobbing softly at having left our beautiful Siena. We attended Mass in the little church down the road from the convent, Mass celebrated by the most loving priest I have ever met, a man who made us feel welcome despite being totally unable to speak English, a man who is obviously much loved by his people. We have also been told that he does a lot of work with the immigrant populations who are very poor and suffer a great deal at the hands of those who distrust them. A genuine man of God.

Today, I will toss a flower into the Arno and say a prayer for all the soldiers who fought their way across the river during WWII in order to help defeat fascism in Europe. Tomorrow, we will return to the medieval in Assisi and then jump around many centuries in Rome before returning to Canada.

God bless all of you. Talk to you later.

Margo

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