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Published: February 2nd 2010
New Years in Florence
2009 certainly ended better than it began. It really beat the pants off playing cards with my 90-year-old grandparents. I remember they had a “party” with their other nonagenarian friends for New Years, but they ran out of things to say/do and went home before the ball dropped.
New Years in Florence was phenomenal.
I will always cherish the memory of the symphony performing in the rain, which fell like tears on the statues of antiquity below, while I leapt with giddy anxiety every time an explosion went off in the piazza behind us.
It was like a beautiful war zone.
Throughout the night, I drank a carton of white table wine. I think it cost €1.10. For the last week I had been attempting to sample the cheapest wine available in Italy. On NYE, I found it. Alex finished off our bottle of Champagne, while I killed the cardboard stuff.
The concert
The NYE symphony show was simply amazing. Surrounded by some of the most famous works of art in the history of the world, we gaped at elaborate fountains and thousand-year-old buildings in every direction. The symphony orchestra blasted out its loudest music to compete
b-heart
Yes, YOU. You know who you are.against the near-deafening sound of festive explosives set off by amateur pyromaniacs nearby.
Sometimes the fireworks would go off at dramatic moments in the performance, turning the entire scene into a harmonious battlefield, reminiscent of “the band played on” at the sinking of the Titanic.
The after party
After midnight struck, we wandered off to watch drunken idiots stumble over a brass hog statue, while attempting to rub its nose. Later we drunkenly met new friends in the bathroom of a restaurant and went dancing for several hours.
At the dance party, there was a Russian cougar who had a thing for me. I danced with her for a while, then went off to find Alex, who had been stolen away by her new friend Tony.
It rained all night long. This inspired me to write a poem about Florence, entitled: “Pissing Romantic.” It is included here, for your enjoyment.
Pissing Romantic
City of David
From another Era
Waiting for a long…
Wet
Ding dong
A hard night
Soaked
With cheap wine
No photo! The fascist exclaims
And later my heart will sing in the rain
This city of chivalry, where I have no bed
Is pissing romantic upon A-duomo
Alex, at the Duomo my head
-
At first we didn’t want to buy an umbrella. We laughed about how the same street vendors who sold cheap umbrellas on nearly every corner will try to sell you cheap sunglasses whenever the sun peaks out. Later, when we wanted to buy a new umbrella, we couldn’t find a vendor. When we did buy one, it broke before the night was through.
No room at the inn
We had nowhere to stay for new years because our host decided, on a whim, to go with her boyfriend’s family to the mountains and then visit Israel. It was rather difficult to find a place to stay ON NEW YEARS’ EVE, but we found a hostel with a bed. Their normal rate was €25. They flat out told me that they had doubled it for the night, “just because we can.” Alex and I both agreed that that was ridiculous, so we did the only thing we could - have me reserve a room for myself, then wait until three AM, and have her stumble in with me and pretend I just picked her up on a street corner.
It worked like a charm. No questions asked
B-David
Ha! I got the photo, despite all the guards hawkishly attempting to prevent all pictures. "No foto! No foto!" they would shout every 20 seconds - but I got it, losers! , and she even got to eat some breakfast at the hostel the next morning.
Our time in Florence
Florence is the heart of everything. Located in the cuore of Tuscany, in the "seno" of Northern Italy. It is the heart of romance, art and the Italian renaissance.
Unsolicited assistance
The first thing I experienced in Florence was guerilla commercialism. As I parked the Vespa at the appointed meeting place (McDonald’s), my luggage began to slip off a little. Out of nowhere, a man arrived to help straighten it. Immediately, he put out his hand and demanded €2. I was soon to learn that unemployed Italian entrepreneurs make a living out of finding ways be of unsolicited assistance to you, then ask for compensation. In some ways I find this more agreeable than common begging, in some ways more annoying. Some examples of this type of service include: watching your car (from being stolen), washing your windows, carrying your bags, taking out your trash, etc…
Later, when I think I actually did need help, my bum friend was nowhere to be found. I had trouble with my luggage when our Firenze host, Elisabetta, arrived on her bicycle to lead us
gayest
Okay, this is the gayest photo I have ever taken. David's wet behind and a rainbow. If anyone wants the original picture to play doctor with, let me know and I will email it to you. back to her home. While I struggled to straighten my bags, there was a group of four men standing nearby who simply watched - until a very small Chinese girl with her own moped came and helped me. Though the men didn’t assist me, one of them asked for my assistance when he dropped a bottle of his own urine onto the platform below him where I was standing. He motioned for me to help hand him back his urine. Ah, those romantic Italian men!
Elisabetta, our host
Alex and I both loved our host. Elisabetta is a sharp, friendly and musical person.
She speaks very little English, but we spoke to her in French, Italian and Spanish, using a circle of languages to communicate and express everything we needed so say. In doing so, I believe we crafted new sentences never before uttered - blending four languages at once.
Elisabetta surprised us by trusting us immediately. After about an hour and a half with us, she left the house to us and went to stay with her boyfriend for the night. We were amazed that she felt so comfortable, and tried to understand why she would take such
boar
Rubbing the boar is a good luck tradition. However, on New Years' Eve, ALL of these people are completely smashed. Take time to admire all of their expressions. a relative “risk” with strangers. Then we discovered through books and music in her flat that she seemed to have a particular penchant for tantric sex, and suddenly everything made sense.
As a way of saying “Thank you” for being our host for our two days in Firenze, Alex and I decided to cook “American food” for Elisabetta and her boyfriend. This meant, of course, Cheeseburgers. This came together quite well, despite the apparent unavailability of cheddar cheese on the European continent. As for Alex, being a Canadian, she was out of luck when the stores didn’t carry "cheesewhiz" or Kraft dinner. She decided to play off her experience in Spain, and made a Spanish omelet for our hosts.
The sights of Firenze
Even in the rain, Piazza di Michaelangelo was brilliant. The sun came out in patches, and it provided a brilliant panorama of the entire Regione. It was easy to see the green line, where the Tuscan countryside ran up to the city of Firenze.
It was here, after the rain cleared, that I took the gayest picture I have ever shuttered. It is included with this posting, and features the wet backside of The Statue of David,
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Street lurker with a colorful rainbow just beyond him.
The day before, we had seen the actual statue of David, guarded closely in The Acadamia. In lieu of armed guards, the museum protected the statue (and everything else in the building) from the dangers of photography by employing a small army of obnoxious old ladies, who would disrupt photographic attempts by yelling “No photo!!” whenever they saw someone brandish a camera. There was never any further prosecution beyond the embarrassment of having been yelled at. It was almost a form of entertainment to hang around David and wait for people to get yelled at, then watch the reaction of these embarrassed people. Just in case you are wondering, I didn’t get yelled at; I got the photo.
Smoking baby
We missed the city’s most famous museum, the Galleria degli uffizi. We made it to the line outside the building, and then had to be somewhere else. Just outside, we watched as two living statues took a break, in costume. One, a cupid, borrowed a smoke from his friend. The image of Eros, expelling chalk-white smoke from his white powdered lips will stay with me always. (Included in the video section of this
blog post).
In parts of Firenze, the streets are difficult to navigate on a moped because of the pedestrian only zones. At one point I ignored these signs and, with Alex on the back, I taxied behind an autobus, right through the pedestrian zone in the rain.
The old bridge (Ponte Vecchio) has shops all along it, mostly selling expensive jewelry. I took some photos of the locks on the bridge. I had originally thought it to be a long-standing tradition; I was later informed by my host Marisa in Napoli that it dates back exactly six years, to a stupid teenage movie from 2004 called “Tre Metri Sopra Il Cielo,” (Three meters above the sky) in which a man and women solidify their love by putting locks on a bridge.
I never locked my love up on a bridge. Maybe I should have. Anyway, It was time to move our show out of town, and we were off to Siena. Alex ported my big bag on the train, giving me the freedom of no luggage for the first and only time on my trip - through the Tuscan countryside!
To be continued…
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Gilbert
non-member comment
Enjoyed
Brennan, I really enjoyed your pictures and commentary. Keep it up.