Florence had a bit of a bumpy start… and several bumps throughout the day really. We did not have our hostel information with us (because someone forgot to print it…) but we didn’t think it would be a big deal since McDonalds supposedly has free WiFi and we could just use our computer to look it up. There was a McDonalds right across from the train station when we got there, so we went it, bought something and attempted to then use the internet. I should have realized there would be a catch… a big one. You had to have a phone number with an Italian area code which could receive a text with the password in it. Since our phones have French area codes, this clearly was a bust, and we had wasted money on bad McDonalds food just to hit this annoying dead end. Ugh. So we went back to the train station to find the tourist office, and the lady told us that there was an internet café in the basement of the train station… we found it, but it was closed on Sundays. So we went back to ask again, and all she said was, “well you’ll just have to find one somewhere in the city.” Great, what a helpful tourist office.
So we set out to find an internet café, knowing we weren’t far from the hostel, but without a name or address it makes it more challenging to find if you know what I mean…although we got lucky and found a cheap internet café rather quickly. We weren’t far at all from one, and we looked up hours for places we wanted to go. It turns out that Sunday is not the day that everything is closed like at home, but rather Monday, so we got lucky in that respect too. We really were like five minutes from the hostel and we put down our stuff and ran out to discover this new city. The sun was shining for the first time in three days in this rainy country and I felt like I was ready to take on the world! We went first to the Medici Chapel where there was some stuff carved by Michelangelo.
This was the first place where we encountered the rather grumpy and money hungry side of Florence. We tried our little “Speak English with French accents trick” again to get reduced admission to the chapel… but no luck. The lady was very mean to us, and without European ID or passports we weren’t getting jack. So we paid 6.50 euro each. It was cool, but really that price was a bit steep. We set back off into the sun and walked around for a while, and we saw that Florence is really very tourist hungry. Anne told us that, “Florence has sold its soul,” and I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that. But know I think I understand a little bit better. Everything in Florence seems to be about selling a product- the product of Italian history and culture. This might seem like a difficult thing to market, but in fact it seems like this is what people come to see and discover: and Italy and its culture from times past—a thing that doesn’t seem to exist anymore (if it ever did) but the people who live here try to capitalize on that, as they should. But it is strange to see people searching to find an experience or something like that, that just doesn’t exist any longer… so they just see it in the form of the relics from the past, with a little spaghetti and pizza with wine mixed in. Is that what I am here to do? To try to discover something from the past that just doesn’t exist? I don’t know. I certainly couldn’t discover Florence in the day I allotted to visit it, so what are my motivations… and do they really matter? Perhaps that will take some more exploring personally. I don’t know exactly. We talked about this a lot with Dr. Foss (and Cheira) last year when we were preparing for and in Tunisia. The risk with Tunisian culture I feel is that people from the west will look at it with an Orientalist eye, making it the exotic thing they want it to be, meanwhile forcing people to sell their culture to survive… and it doesn’t seem like Italian culture runs quite the same risk… so what was it that seemed so, unnatural about the entire city? I don’t know. But I could certainly see how someone might say that Florence has sold its soul… to tourists or whoever is willing to pay the highest price.
The second place we saw was the Hospital of the Innocents, which I am pretty sure, is where people used to drop off the babies they didn’t want in the middle ages. We read about this place in Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book with Dr. Kevin Moore this past semester. It seems like now it is a UNICEF place which actually has some real irony about it, since 90% of the babies who got dropped off there died.
The building itself was also supposed to be the first building designed in the Renaissance style, which is also neat, and involves a lot fewer dead babies. Then we went to our second museum the Academia Gallerie, where we were greeted with a large: NO INTERNATIONAL STUDENT DICOUNTS and we paid another 6.50 euro to see some paintings and thing. But the real attraction here is that it houses Michelangelo’s David. It was very neat to see this amazingly famous and absolutely huge statue created by the master. I guess I can cross that off my bucket list now. Another (just as cool thing in my book) thing we found was that in the staircase leading up to the second floor, there was a small exhibit of paintings from Russia from around the 13th century, and one of them was an image of the three Magi… and one was an Ethiopian!
Holy crap! I can’t wait to tell Anne about it, and show her the illegal picture I took of it. Wow, I will have to do some more research about this image and where it came from. The second floor of the Gallerie was a room full of, “gold shiny Jesuses.” Really they were iconic images from the 12th and 13th centuries, but all I can say is that if I never see another gold and shiny Jesus again, it will be too soon. So we set out again, although the sun had disappeared, and the clouds were gathering around the city again. We went to the Il Duomo
in this city, which was absolutely huge, and right next to a building that has “the doors that started the Renaissance” on the front.
They are cool and very intricately carved, since it took 20 years for one person to complete them. The cathedral was huge, but far less impressive on the inside than the St. Marc’s cathedral in Venice. By this point we needed a pick me up- which we found in the form of some gelato outside of the Uffizi Gallery, which was the third and final museum of the day that we visited. We paid another 6.50 euro to get in and we saw the lady behind the counter give an old man a really hard time about letting his wife in for free (since they were both over 65) without seeing her ID. If they are going to be mean to old people about paying the fee to get in, then I think Florence really has sold some part of its soul… It is one thing to be mean to students trying to save a buck, but an old man and his wife? Really? Good lord. In this museum we saw several works by several famous people including Michelangelo, DaVinci, Raphael, Dürer, Botticelli, Rembrandt, and some others. It was neat to see some things by these masters, but it was also very crowded. We only saw a few gold shiny Jesuses (and I almost freaked when we saw a room of them, but don’t worry we skipped that room). But as we tromped around in the museum it rained outside, and I was glad to be inside since the POS umbrella from Milan was back in the room at the hostel. By the time we left it had stopped raining, and the river in the city really looked very beautiful.
We walked down the river, and back up again to our hostel, very tired at this point from the long day of walking and exploring and handing out 6.50 euro every other minute to see works of art. We did walk back past Dante’s house
and church which was neat, and we made it back for a good rest before going out to dinner at 9:30 pm. We found a cheap pizza place and enjoyed some pizza and wine (Italian culture at its finest, or tourists being appeased? It is hard to say. Or is it?) We also ran into some other Americans who had come to see some soccer games… and they were friendly but it was weird to talk to other Americans. We told them that we were studying in France for the semester, and all they really had to say was that they don’t really like France. I was sort of floored by that statement, since in the past few days I have found myself saying on several occasions: “I miss France.” Is it because I miss the ease of navigating someplace rather familiar now after several weeks, or because I miss the language or what? I don’t know. It seems strange to miss a place that is not quite home, but I do. Clearly this is a more challenging vacation than others I have taken in the past, but still I find it strange that when I think, “I wish I could go” the place I want to be is Paris (expensive coffee and all) and not DePauw or Dayton. I don’t know, that could change, but I just find that to be a strange emotion.
So all in all, Florence was kind of up and down. We had to pay money to see a lot of things and go a lot of places, which I feel is rather indicative of a place that is completely run by the tourist industry, but I suppose that is not all bad, it just is. It is home to a lot of cool things and history, but at the same time it felt kind of cheap and tacky at times… nothing like Venice or really even Milan. All three cities felt very different and unique, which is really not that surprising since you would have the same sort of experience if you went to different cities in France, or in the United States. ( I was just very tempted to type Aux Etats-Unis, so there you go.) But this whirlwind weekend has most definitely been an adventure and a success, and I look forward to seeing what Rome holds for us in this next week! And have I mentioned that I can’t wait to see Alana?
Ciao!
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