Il Duomo di Firenze

schmetterling May 17, 2014

My second day in Florence started with lining up at the Duomo bright and early. The ticket office was a bit difficult to locate. I was told "number 7 on the wall". I ran around the entire vicinity before I finally found a nondescript small metal 7 beside a door opening into a courtyard. The ticket office was hidden deep inside.

I lined up for climbing the dome first, while I still had some energy. Having climbed both Notre Dame and St. Paul's Cathedral on my last trip to Europe, the Duomo seemed a much quicker climb. (I believe there are a few hundred steps less in the Duomo.) The stairs are very narrow and become quite steep towards the top.

After climbing to the top, you're rewarded with a wonderful view of the red roof tops of Florence.

The cathedral, dome and bell tower are decorated with patterned marble in green and red on the entire façade. The construction of the cathedral spanned 140 years and 9 architects.

A small snack of lampredotto, with two types of salsa from a small cart a few steps from the dome. I tend to maybe overdo it a bit when it comes to local foods when I travel. (On my first visit to London, I ate a hearty breakfast of black pudding, baked beans, tomato, fried bread, mushrooms and sausage every single day.) I think I showed some restraint by only having tripe 3 times during my 2 day stay.

The cathedral is underlain by Roman ruins and an older church. There's an exhibition of some artifacts that were found and sketches of the plan above and beyond. The exhibit let's you walk among some of the excavated ruins and on the mosaic floors from centuries ago.

The floor of the modern cathedral above and the mosaics of the ruins below.

The Baptistery was undergoing renovations so the outside was completely covered in scaffolding. The Baptistery is octagonal and built on the location of a series of older baptistery. The octagon shape is apparently often used for baptisteries as the number 8 is very important in Christian numerology, symbolizing resurrection.

The ceiling of the Baptistery is richly decorated in golden mosaics depicting Biblical scenes, angels, and the last judgement. The full gamut of angelic beings are depicted: dominions, powers, archangels, regular angels, principalities, virtues and thrones.

The famous bronze doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti have been restored and are now preserved in the nearby Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, behind glass in a dehumidified environment. The doors on the Baptistery are a replica.

For lunch, there are plenty of choices in the streets radiating from the Duomo.

Pappa al Pomodoro (Florentine tomato soup)

Pappardelle al Cinghiale (pasta with wild boar)

Tagliatelle ai Porcini (pasta with wild porcini mushrooms)

Sadly my time in Florence drew to a close and I boarded the train for Venice. The first thing I did in Venice was eat more food. I was especially looking forward to squid ink risotto.

We stayed in a lovely hotel, that I will introduce more in my next posts on Venice.

An Englishman in Italy

schmetterling May 12, 2014

After my vacation, a few people have asked me how I fared with English or presumed that I spoke some Italian. In actuality, the Italian I know are either limited to not very useful words like "allegro" or "poco-a-poco", or extremely simple ones like "scusi" and "parla inglese?".

It was very convenient to converse in English at all the major tourist sites and with hotel and restaurant staff. I rarely felt any difficulties getting around Italy. For the most part the pronunciation was easy to understand, with church and tourist information booth staff having the least obvious accent.

Many of those in the tourism industry spoke French and German as well. (I noticed quite a lot of German tourists in Italy.) For some reason, the French and German they spoke sounded very much like Italian in intonation, while their English was generally quite good.

What I found more useful than speaking or listening (the announcements on trains are fairly incoherent in any languages, make sure to look at the signs approaching a station) was reading. Most signs have Italian as the largest and most visible words. Restaurants away from the main tourist streets also may not have English on menus.

Studying up on some basic Italian before a trip is helpful but if you have a basic grasp on some other Romance languages, you can "learn on the fly". It was fairly simple to identify basic patterns in the language and memorize useful words like "biglietteria" (ticket office) selling "biglietti" (tickets).

I basically don't have too much to say on the subject other than it's fairly easy to get around the major tourist destinations with English. Obviously you'll need more Italian knowledge for locations off the well worn paths.

There are still a lot more posts about my trip to Italy. I took a slight break for a little whilte but I aim to restart my blogging efforts soon.

Firenze - Day 1

schmetterling April 30, 2014

I started off the first day in Florence by lining up at the Uffizi museum bright and early. You can buy line skipping tickets for a few euros extra online which I highly recommend for the summer. But if it's not the high tourist season and you start the day early, I would suggest waiting the 30-45 min and use the money towards some delicious trippa for lunch. No pictures are allowed inside!

I suggest waking up early either way because Florence has lovely street scenes. The ruddy orange hues of the buildings are beautiful in the soft light of the early morning.

The Uffizi houses a vase collection of works originating from the Medici family collection. They were donated by the last heiress of the family, with the explicit condition that none of the artwork was to leave Florence. Depending on how fast you view art, how much of the exhibition halls are open at a time, and whether or not you choose to rent an audio-tour, the Uffizi will likely take around two to four hours.

There’s too many famous artwork in the Uffizi to cover here. There should be a few pieces familiar to most people, including Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” and “La Primavera”. Of course there’s the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Caravaggio, and of Michelangelo, Raphael, and other great artists of the Italian Renaissance. I was personally excited about Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” as I had written a short paper on Titian in high school. This Venus is considered to be from his “middle period” in terms of style and is striking in the bold stare of the Venus towards the viewer as she reclines in full nudity, the effect more so in person.

When I saw an artwork I had studied, I would excitedly look for the important artistic and historical details, the symbolism, the use of colours and shadows that I had learned about all those years ago. (I will admit I prattled off facts like a child returning from a particularly exciting school-lesson.) For artwork I was unfamiliar with, I simply enjoyed the beauty and tried to infer a little bit about it from the subject matter and what styles or symbolism I could recognize. One of the joys of the Uffizi, in addition to the paintings on display in the individual salons, is the hallways hung with portraits, the ceiling painted with all manner of birds and pastoral themes and statues littering along the sides.

(Now that I’ve thoroughly bored you with my words, time for some pictures.)

The bridge Ponte Vecchio is just a few steps away from the Uffizi. If you’re a photography buff, I recommend visiting in the late afternoon to early evening for the best light. I took just a few random shots since the weather wasn’t too good. I think the bridge should be also of some professional interest to any structural engineers, planners or architects.

The stores on the bridge sell mostly fine jewellery. I would say the main draw here is actually the closed stores, where you can see the traditional store front and the metal detailing.

Through the help of a poor restaurant waiter who was trying to gather business, I got directions to a food cart selling the Florentine street food trippa (tripe.) I got it in a container, as opposed to the sandwich, in the tomato broth it’s cooked in and topped with a bit of salsa verde. Trippa and lampredotto (fourth stomach) are typically around 4.5 euros for the sandwich and 7 euros for a bowl.

The food cart was near the back of the market, Mercato Nuovo, famous for the Fontana del Porcellino. Rubbing the nose of the bronze statue of a wild boar is said to bring you back to Florence in the future. The piglet has a very shiny nose indeed. (Very difficult to get a good picture due to the tourists crowded around.)

Next up was Loggia dei Lanzi and Piazza della Signoria, home to the replica of Michelangelo’s “David” and other well-known statues. It was around then that it started raining so I went for some gelato and to hide from the rain for a bit. Oh and I also passed by some churches along the way.

Not the same church. Second one pictured also had very nice stained glass windows (less common in Italy than in France I noticed) and statues around the outside walls. Unfortunately none of my pictures turned out very well.

This is one of the famous gelato stores you’ll find in guidebooks, as you can see from the crowd milling about. A bit of (industrial) engineering geekiness: they have a really efficient system where you pay for the cup size first and then go in front of the glass display to point out your flavours. They had one guy working the till and two at serving ice cream.

After some delicious gelato, the heavens cleared up and I started the climb to Piazzale Michelangelo. I encountered an amusing little statue crossing one of the many bridges spanning the river. Quite a confident gait; I wonder what the artist is suggesting…

As I was walking through the streets of Florence, I had noticed some street signs with amusing stickers placed over them. Continuing on by the river side, heading towards Piazzale Michelangelo, I started seeing more and more… until I accidently stumbled upon the artist’s shop! Unfortunately it was closed, but I did take a few sneaky pictures through the window. After that I paid extra attention in hopes of catching some more humorously defaced signs.

The artist is Clet Abraham, French but living in Florence for the better part of 20 years. You can search online for more of his works. (Facebook page: https://fr-fr.facebook.com/pages/CLET/108974755823172)

On the way up a set of shallow stone steps, a hidden garden was tucked into the wall. Run by the local Lions Club, the garden is freely open to the public year round and contains a myriad of roses, lemon trees, wisteria and other plants. It also offers a great view of the hilly outskirts of Florence and the old city walls. (It also happens to be a great place for taking pretty pictures of oneself.)

(Leave it to an engineer to purposely leave a crane in frame in a photo.)

The steps have a series of crosses on small piled up stone pyramids along the right-hand side: the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The final one is by the entrance of a church after you climb the stairs to the top.

Piazzale Michelangelo offers some breathtaking views of Florence. The actual piazza holds some bronze replicas of Michelangelo statues. As a side note, you will find a rather clean and free public washroom just underneath the steps of the piazza, a rare treat in Italy

I was ready for a hearty meal after all those stairs and an entire day of walking. Dinner was at the famous Il Latini. Be warned that they do require a reservation. If you’re particularly lucky, you may get a table without a reservation if you have a small party and go early enough, as in my case. The restaurant has a warm rustic feel. Wine bottles line the walls and (real!) prosciutto legs hang from the ceiling.

Florentine steaks are made with high grade beef and sold by weight. Generally half a kilogram is the least amount they will sell at a time. The friendly waiter (more like a jolly uncle) recommended about 500g per person with some appetizers and local vegetables on the side. If you have more of an appetite, get some regional pasta (pici) and some thick tomato soup (pappa al pomodoro). And don’t forget the table wine!

Steak is 50 euros per kilogram. Wine is about 12 euros a litre. You pour yourself and the waiter will estimate the price when he comes around to do the bill based on how much of the bottle you drank. Prices are around average for a nice sit down restaurant. Website here: http://www.illatini.com/?lang=en. Mark the location on your cellphone map using wifi before you leave the hotel, Italian roads can be difficult to navigate with address alone.

Dinner was finished off with some free Tuscan biscotti and a small glass of Vin Santo (sweet liquor). And off I wandered, slightly inebriated with both wine and food, into the cool night air of Firenze.

Cinque Terre & Pisa

schmetterling April 27, 2014

My first stop in Italy was to be Pisa and Cinque Terre, which was added to the itinerary rather late so we were very time constrained. Setting off from Florence, we took the train first to Pisa, and a bus to the actual Leaning Tower of Pisa.

I really like trains. Possibly because they always suggested something very foreign and romantic, like "Murder on the Orient Express". I read copious amounts of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, where they started many adventures on the first train to some countryside destination. The local trains in Italy function more like long distance buses. You buy a ticket that's valid through a certain time period and you validate the ticket before you get on the train.

We had a bit of an adventure getting to the tower. Italian transportation websites aren't very user friendly, so we ended up taking the almost-but-not-exactly-right bus, getting off within sight of the tower and wandering through a residential area to get to Piazza del Duomo.

The tower was a lot more slanted than I thought. Apparently it leans only 4 degrees but it looked in real danger of toppling over at a gentle shake. What I found interesting was the slight curving you can see from about half-way up the tower, as the later architect tried to correct for the tilt which was already present when they first started construction.

The cathedral was quite wonderful. Lots of mosaics and some Byzantine influences. Marble, paintings, sculptures and glittering gold everywhere. Some of the highlights are the lunette of the Virgin Mary over the main entrance, the ornate pulpit, the beautiful coffer ceiling and dome, and the remains of a saint (although the verity of relics are always suspicious in my mind.)

Cinque Terre is a collection of five villages designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site: Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. We headed off to Cinque Terre by train through La Speiza. I found out later the trains were running two behind, so we accidentally boarded the wrong train which went directly to Monterosso. Our original plan was for just Manarola and Riomaggiore. The unfortunate mistake with the train schedule and the closure of the paths connecting the villages resulted in the rather better plan of taking the boat, which allowed us brilliant views of the villages from the water.

There are no food pictures in this post because I forgot about taking photos until after I ate everything.

I had delicious fresh seafood fried up and served in paper cones, fresh local fruits and baked bread at Cinque Terre. So delicious that I ate fritto misto two times at different shops and forgot to take pictures until after I ate most of it, both times!

The first thing I have to say about Cinque Terre is "the pictures are a lie". It doesn't look nearly as colorful as some of the photographers have managed to make it look. I did find a way to cheat my way to nicer photos using an in-built camera filter or by ridiculous adjustments to exposure and white balance.

I'm not saying the villages are boring, they most emphatically are very quaint and lovely. It just didn't look as strikingly beautiful as the pictures that turn up when you google for Cinque Terre.

Via dell'Amore was closed but we did find plenty of locks at various places.

Next post will be on Florence. It will have plenty of food pictures, I promise.

Italy Digest

schmetterling April 26, 2014

I had an amazing time during my first visit to Italy. There's too many pictures and too much to tell, so I'll start off slow with some iPhone photos while I sort through the 1200 on my camera. We visited Florence, (Cinque Terre, Pisa), Venice and Rome on this trip. Rather than a true digest, this is more of an introduction.

The flight there wasn't too bad; as usual I spent the time catching up on movies. We transferred in Amsterdam, where I got to sit on some cool Danish Modern chairs. We took a taxi from the airport to our hotel once we reached Florence. Our taxi driver was an impeccably dressed elderly Italian man in a purple sweater. In Italy, the lanes are a suggestion: 4 cars, 2 scooters and a bicycle easily drive through a three lane road. It's all traffic circles in Italy, which just added to the chaos.

"lemon and wisteria" -- one of the many leitmotifs of my trip in Italy. Flowers blanketed daily life in Italy, unlike North America where they are too often relegated to appearances on special occasions only. They overflowed on balconies and you were bound to find a flower market on weekends.

And the food! Not just pasta and pizza, although there were many, for me on this trip. I didn't imagine pasta and pizza could taste so much better as they did in Italy. There was absolutely wonderful seafood in Venice and Cinque Terre, and of course I hunted out the local specialties, like tripe (trippa and lampredotto) in Florence. I've had more gelato in two weeks than I normally eat during an entire summer.

This is just a small sample of the overwhelming spam of food pictures to come.

Italy was a wonderful mix of the modern and the old: cars and scooters racing down narrow cobblestone alleyways, wooden shutters on leaning old buildings selling cellphone sim cards, and modern concrete buildings straddling the ruins of empires gone by. Very different from the sterile newness that pervades North American cities.

Rome in particular was an amazing millefeuille of Baroque wrapped Renaissance churches built on Roman Republic plazas built on early Roman ruins built over ancient pagan temples.

The architecture is of course undeniably magnificent. The churches are draped in decadence: mosaics, paintings, marble and sculptures cover every surface. There's a mixture of styles spanning years and countries. I did start to get a bit of church fatigue towards the end and my neck was hurting from straining to see the frescos on the ceilings. (A quote from Mr. Demwell, my half Italian high school teacher: "ABC, another bloody church".)

I was incredibly happy with all the wonderful and amazing artworks I was able to see. Similar to my trip to the Louvre, there's an incredible sense of excitement at seeing paintings and sculptures I've studied but so far only seen in pictures. By the end of our meander through the Uffizi, I had taught my mother to recognize the Annunciation and baby John the Baptist in paintings.

(Another credit here to Mr. Demwell for his explanation of the Assumption which I used: you can't have Jesus' mother dying, especially not growing old or with sickness. No claims to dogmatic or theological correctness.)

In Venice, everything was a boat, even the traffic jams. I'll probably harp on this point again later. Garbage boat, postal boat, ambulance boat, police boat, taxi boat, construction boat...

A highlight of my trip: seeing the Pope! (I think. Does it look like the pope?) We happened to be in St. Peters while they were wrapping up a mass.

Next up: Cinque Terre and Pisa! (A fair warning now that there will be almost no food pictures because I was too excited and ate everything before I remembered.)

Il Duomo di Firenze

An Englishman in Italy

Firenze - Day 1

Cinque Terre & Pisa

Italy Digest

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