Colorado Cruiser: Italy Day 5 Florence

Thursday May 7th, 2009

The Diana Hotel in Florence includes a complementary continental breakfast. It featured several hard breads, a couple different cheeses including fresh mozzarella, jams, hard boiled eggs, yogurt, cold cereal, and juice. We sat watching Japenese cartoons dubbed into Italian while a German group discussed their plans for the day. Our plans were to visit all of the museums and climb to the top of a huge domed cathedral called the Duomo. We were in a Duomo in Siena yesterday, so that must just be an Italian word for cathedral, but googling “Duomo” seems to hit much more on the Florence Duomo than anything else.

Our first stop was the Galleria dell’ Academia . We asked the desk clerk to call us a taxi, but he assured us that the walk was no more than 10 minutes. We believed him and started walking. It took us nearly 25 minutes. I think we have to apply a reverse Farenheight/Centegrade conversion to any time this guy tells us because yesterday he said the train station was 15 minutes but it took us 35. So we take his times, multiply by 9, divide by 5, and add 32 it would probably be about right.

The roads were packed with cars and scooters. I don’t remember if I’ve blathered on about the scooters here yet, but there are allot of them. They are all very small and make a high pitched whine like a gas powered yard trimmer (seriously). I’m really surprised that they allow 2 stroke motors because they pollute so much more than even a car does.

The scooters also drive more like high speed pedestrians. They whip up through any gap at any time to get past traffic. They don’t go on the sidewalks much, but I have seen a few do that to get around other vehicles. Of course I’ve seen taxis do the same too. At every traffic light the scooters keep filtering forward until by the time the light changes, there is a gaggle of scooters all riding together trying to out accelerate the cars for the open road. The scooters freely drive down the center of the street to bypass traffic, and even down the opposite side if there is enough room between the oncoming cars.

The scooters and drivers all seem oblivious to how close they come to crashing sometimes. The night we were going down to the Coliseum for photos, our taxi was on a fairly narrow 2 lane road. There was a vehicle parked on our side so our driver moved over to pass it, but at the same time a scooter started coming around us. The scoot had to shift until he was slightly to the other side of the center line. There was an oncoming car and a scooter with a scooter passing it coming towards us. All 5 vehicles were sharing the same 2 lanes for a split second there with only an inch or two gap between each. And all of this while going 35 mph. The scooters just seem to think that the added convenience of avoiding traffic and easy parking are worth the risks. One of our taxi drivers said that there are serious scooter accidents every day, and especially when it rains. Scooters just slide off the road or into other vehicles on the slippery roads all the time.

But I digress.

So we’re on our way to the Galleria dell’ Academia which is the museum where Michelangelo’s statue of “The David” is displayed. Entering requires either an hour or two of standing in line, or getting reservations for a specific time. Our concierge in Rome stayed on the phone for over an hour to get us reservations so that we could walk right past the schmucks in line and straight into the museum.

The first thing we noticed was the sign saying that cameras were forbidden. That turned out to be the theme of the day. No cameras were allowed in any of the 3 major museums we visited. The outside of the museums weren’t that impressive, so not many pictures today.

This Galleria used to be an art school and when they said “arts”, they meant sculpture, painting, and music. All 3 were represented here, but all of the crowds were around the sculptures.

The central hall of the museum starts with 4 sculptures by Michelangelo. There are 4 sculptures, each shows a slave bound in leather straps. Each slave is struggling to escape their bonds with their muscles bulging, faces contorted in effort and bodies twisted. Michelangelo never finished the sculptures so each slave also appears to be trying to escape not only from his bonds, from the very block of granite as well. Michelangelo originally intended the slaves to depict mortal men trying to free themselves of the bonds of mortal sin, but it’s easy to picture all sorts of habits as the confining bonds.

At the end of the hall and under a dome stands the “David” by Michelangelo, probably the most famous sculpture in the world.

The statue of David was originally designed to go atop a building, so Michelangelo made the head and hands oversized so they could be seen from far away. But it wound up in a plaza, and now in a museum where its just a few feet away and the oversized features seem just a bit odd. But the perfection of the carving and the intricate details of skin, joints, muscle, etc make it incredible to see. David’s gaze is so focused and penetrating. He is carrying his sling and rocks so he must be looking at Goliath and getting ready to face him. I walked around the statue 4 or 5 times, first trying to imagine all the things that David was thinking and feeling, then trying to imagine what Michelangelo wanted me to think and feel.

The paintings in the rest of the museum were almost entirely 13th century work on wood and came out of churches. That isn’t my favorite type of art with all of the stylized stick figures and the gold backing to everything so we didn’t stay too long looking at those.

We left the Galleria and headed toward the Duomo. This church has a huge dome that you can climb. It has 463 steps to the top, and since Mike told me about it, I’ve been psyching myself up to be ready to climb it. We thought there would be a long line of people waiting to climb to the top but there was no one. We walked right in, paid, and began the ascent.

The stairs were very narrow and fairly steep. They started with square flights of about 5 steps around, making 20 steps per turn, but that only lasted until the first major terrace, about 1/3 of the way up. We came out on a very narrow terrace (ledge) on the inside of the dome. It had a Plexiglas partition preventing us from falling, but that also meant that we only had a couple of foot wide gap to scooch ourselves around on. We had to scoot 50 yards around the ledge until we went through a passage in the wall leading to the next set of stairs. These were tight spirals and very steep. Each step felt like 8 inches high and the walls were only 3 feet apart. By the time we finished that, were emerged on another narrow ledge even higher up on wall and right by the ceiling frescos.

We scooted around this ledge and again entered another passage with more stairs. As we ascended the stairs, the curve of the dome began to be noticeable. The outside wall visibly curved over us, forcing us lean in just a bit. The stairs were in long flights, but they weren’t steep. Some thoughtful ancient architect has seen fit to put a small round window in the wall about every so often, just so that some overweight American struggling for breath could try to stick his face in it and such in some cool air. How he knew I was coming, I’ll never know, but I did stick my face in every window while resting and gasping for breath, but saying aloud to anyone who might hear “Hmm, I wonder if there’s a nice view in this window” so they would think I’d only stopped for artistic reasons. I’m sure no one noticed the sweat pouring off me.

The higher we went, the steeper the curve of the walls around the stairs, and the more awkward it became until finally we reached a set of stairs that turned and went directly up the inside wall of the dome. There was a window right at the base of these steps, so I stopped for another “artistic” view of the city, then turned to meet the last monster.

There were people coming down these steps, so we had to wait for a break in the traffic, then charge up. Well charge is way too strong of a word for what I did. The first steps were very steep and narrow, but as we neared the top they shallowed. Blessedly sweet cool fresh air descended through a trap door at the top lured me on, and I climbed through to the most striking views of the trip.

Striking views is a clear understatement. It was magnificent to look across Florence.

We stood gazing out across the city at each of the 8 railings for several minutes each. Then we started jostling with the crowd while trying to get a few pictures of us both. There weren’t more than 30 people up on the top, but it’s narrow enough that you have to squeeze past each other. I couldn’t set my tripod up, but there was a wire railing around the central part of the dome that held the roof over our heads, and I could jam the between it and the pillars to get the camera elevated and take pictures of us with the whole city behind us.

Large tour groups came up a couple of times but they only stayed for a few minutes each. After that climb, and with the views we had, I wasn’t about to shoot 2 pictures and leave like some of the groups. Photo time stamps show that we stayed about 40 minutes.

The descent was much easier than the ascent and we soon found ourselves back at ground level looking up at the top of the dome. WOW what a great experience that was.

We thought about going inside the Duomo or the baptistry, but we were getting a bit churched out. We grabbed some lunch at a very small cafe, then wandered towards the next museum. We had an appointment for the Uffizi at 2:30, but was we wandered we noticed a building with allot of sculptures in it. When we consulted a map, we realized it was the Bargello which has a huge collection of sculpture from Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, and many other famous artists.

The Bargello also forbids cameras, so no pics. We wandered for nearly 2 hours through the 3 story building looking at centuries old priceless sculptures by most of the famous rennisance artists. The only pictures we could take were out the window towards Ponte Vecchio.

After the Bargello we headed to the Uffizi. We had an appointment here too, so we bypassed the lines and went straight in.

After we left the Uffizi, we walked over to Ponte Vecchio (The Old Bridge). There were jewelry shops on each side of the bridge, all the way across. Few of the shops had prices on the display items, but the few that did had prices so high I needed a loan just to look at them.

It was getting late in the day, but neither of us were very hungry, so we walked back to Piazza della Signoria by the Uffizi. This is the plazza where Michelangelo's sculpture of David was originally located. There is a full size replica here now. Right next to it is a covered area with about 10 sculptures. All of those were replicas as well, and we've seen almost all of the originals at either the Vatican, Louvre, or other museums we've been to in Italy. We wandered looking at the statues and listening to some background music. It was several minutes before we realized we were hearing a live singing group. It was the applause of everyone in the plazza that finally gave it away.

We walked around the square for a bit, then picked one of the open cafe's and went in to have "due' coca lite" (2 diet cokes) and some lite snacks. We sat enjoying the square and watching the people as they watched the sculptures and fountains. We stretched our stay to over an hour just relaxing, and the waiters never gave us the impression that they wanted us to move on.

As the sun neared setting we noticed that the statue of David was very distinct on the wall behind it. I hurried over and took a few pictures. After a few minutes there were 20 other people all trying to get the same picture. The sun was lined up perfectly down a long thin street so there aren't many days when the sun shines right at sunset with the beautiful golden glow.

We finally left the cafe and wandered some of the back streets of Florence just to get a feel for the place. At one point we were walking down a narrow road when I heard something like a diesel engine behind me. I turned around to see a city bus coming straight towards us. We plastered ourselves against one wall and the bus passed without hardly slowing down. I quickly grabbed my camera and got a picture of it because I couldn't believe that a bus could even make it down that road. Everyone else also stood against a wall, then continued walking as if it was no big deal.

Neither of us were very hungry, so we found a place to get some Gelato, then wandered around the Duomo for a while. Finally we got a taxi and headed back to our hotel to get some rest.

Mike climbing the starts in the Duomo