in which I again have internet access

Happy birthday, Papersky!

I have just gotten back from a long stretch in Italy, which was basically without internet. If anything happened to you since November 11th that you would like me to know about, it would be a good idea to tell me, or link to it, because I doubt I will ever be caught up. (This... holds a little less true if we have had some sort of interaction about it, but I could probably use a reminder even about things I definitely know about, because I have been very busy and very tired.)

Later today I'll start putting up my travel diary, Florence and Rome.

in which I again have internet access

Happy birthday, papersky!

I have just gotten back from a long stretch in Italy, which was basically without internet. If anything happened to you since November 11th that you would like me to know about, it would be a good idea to tell me, or link to it, because I doubt I will ever be caught up. (This... holds a little less true if we have had some sort of interaction about it, but I could probably use a reminder even about things I definitely know about, because I have been very busy and very tired.)

Later today I'll start putting up my travel diary, Florence and Rome.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.

Florence, Italy, November 12th, 2011

I have... a lot of words of trip diary, so I'll put it up here in chunks, usually one day's entry at a time. A bit of context: this was the fourth time I'd been to Florence and by far the longest stay. Thrud has lived in Italy for job reasons on-and-off for a cumulative total of a little more than three years at this point, and has been there this time since June.


Firenze (November 12th, 2011)

I have just arrived in Florence, Italy, where I am visiting my housemate Thrud, whom some of you may know from her blog Ex Urbe (which I highly recommend). It was a long trip-- Washington, D.C. to Montreal to Munich to the Florence airport to the airport bus, which takes you to Santa Maria Novella train station, from which, paradoxically enough, we walked. The Florence airport is tiny and embarrassed and has a plethora of ways to get you to the train station as fast as possible, because it knows that's how you really ought to have come to town. I don't think I even saw any signs for Alitalia gates, just the Lufthansa flight that brought me in and the omnipresent-throughout-Europe Ryanair. Santa Maria Novella, on the other hand, is one of those imposing station-cum-mall-cum-monument things that is a center of city life and knows it, and this is as it should be.

Between the airport and the station is new Florence, which isn't much to look at, all modernist buildings in the same style, beige with balconies and extravagant roof gardens, and then one glorious head-turning moment where the modernist architect clearly went mad, threw down his plans for beige balcony after beige balcony, and said “all right, now we're going to do things my way, and my way is ROUND and CHOCOLATE BROWN with POINTY SHINY BITS and LOTS OF ARTILY ANGLED GLASS and also CHROME oh all right I realize it's in the contract you can have your balconies BUT WE ARE PAINTING THE IRONWORK LIME GREEN IN PROTEST”. I really liked that building; it was the architectural equivalent of a temper tantrum.

After the station you are in the old city, the Renaissance city which is all of a piece with itself, the maze of little streets and littler streets and astounding giant monuments and infinite churches which make up the Republic. I have walked into the plaza of Santa Maria della Fiore, the famous Duomo, from every possible angle-- there aren't that many alleys and streets which let out into it-- and it is not physically possible for the building not to come as a surprise. The streets around it are so narrow that you can't see the thing until you are suddenly there: one moment it's the cobbled lane full of about five lanes of traffic (two car, which is improbable enough, plus bicycle, pedestrian, Vespa, and occasionally something weird like horse) and the next moment it's The Largest Dome, looking down at you sleepily from its red, sunlit heights and mentioning that you, personally, are tiny next to the labor of the thousands (not to mention Brunelleschi). To get to Thrud's apartment you go between the Baptistery and the Duomo, past the column of poor neglected Saint Zenobius (Florence's patron saint, whom no one has particularly heard of), turn a couple of times until you get to the street with the best gelato shop in the city, go into an extremely imposing door with the knob solidly set in its middle to ensure you have no leverage, and then.

Well. It is a twelfth-century building. It's been divided and subdivided, of course, not to mention replastered. Most places that have flights of stairs, you can look up and say, hey, that's a flight of stairs, I can see where that's going, it goes around. This one, the stairs go up, and then they wander off to the right, and then they go in a sort of S-shape, and then they meander through some brick arches for a while, and all the time you're going gee, this is really a lot of stairs, but I can see through the outside windows that the ceilings aren't very high, so what the hell have they got in here? Above-ground catacombs? And then the stairs loop some more, pass a few oddly shaped windows with spectacular views of the belltower of the Duomo framed by various gutters, and there are some locked metal grids and things in the walls, and anything you are carrying has now become your own, personal nemesis. There are eight flights. Eight.

The apartment at the top is worth it: windows in absolutely all directions, from which you can see all five or six belltowers which will start up at seven in the morning, and the least stupid bathroom I have met in Italy, and a roof terrace; a high crow's nest of odd cubbies and antique wood crammed up against new linoleum. It's one of those places which never stops feeling high up even if all the windows are shut and curtained.

Down the street and round the corner is O' Vesuvio, which is where one goes for Neapolitan pizza if one does not want it authentically Neapolitan (in actual Naples, the pizza is a) not that great and b) served by people who are growling at you). This is where one goes for pizza with fresh mozzarella, porcini, finely shredded parsley, and precisely the right quantity of garlic; Thrud told me to get them to add chopped tomatoes and was correct. Pizza like this does not exist in the U.S. Period. It is food-coma pizza, the kind of food that you can't ever stop paying attention to, where even after you get used to the flavor it's so profoundly fascinating that you keep forgetting what you are having a conversation about. The shop has an oven half-hidden under teetering stacks of stone, a do-it-yourself-if-you-want-it-done-but-we-still-love-you-customers aesthetic, and interior décor that could not possibly have been planned or considered for one second by anyone ever. There is actual laundry actually hanging from the actual ceiling. About eight euros a (one-person) pie and it is definitively world-class pizza.

Then we went to Per che non, which is the best gelato shop in Florence, and got the obligatory fruiti di bosco. This means 'woodland fruits', and it's blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, redcurrants, and magic. Even Giolitti's, which is the best gelateria in Rome and therefore probably in the world, does not have fruiti di bosco like that, because Per che's tastes as though someone hand-picked the very best possible of each kind of fruit-- which is probably exactly what happened-- and then, possibly using some kind of holy relic or mystical ray, went through and made the whole thing synergetically better. You get three flavors in a cup, so I also got the fiori di latte (whipped-cream-flavored ice-cream, which sounds like a terrible idea but works very well; I have however been spoiled by the memory of Giolitti's version, so this, which was only excellent, was somewhat disappointing) and the kaki (Japanese persimmon, and yes, that was everything I like about kaki but without the part where it explodes all over you when you open it with a spoon).

Afterward, went and became a Friend of the Uffizi. This is where you go and pay sixty euros to get into a whole list of museums in Florence and surrounding environs for a calendar year and, which is a bit more important, mostly get to skip the line. Plus a neat little card with a Botticelli on it, and the chance to say you're a member of the Uffizi.

Then grocery shopping-- heirloom tomatoes twice the size and half the price of the ones at home, smelling ambrosial; kaki, because; mozzarella di bufalo, because. Dinner was the tomatoes chopped and fried with shaved garlic, salt, and ground black pepper over bucatini, the noodle that looks like thick spaghetti with a hole through it like a drinking straw. A little basil from the roof garden, a little parmesan.

It was upon sitting in the after-dinner chatting phase and eating the croissants papersky got for Thrud in Montreal that I realized that I was sitting and eating croissant from Marché Atwater in Montreal and mozzarella di bufalo from that morning's batch near Florence at the same time, which is so clearly ludicrous that I decided I had probably fallen asleep some time ago without noticing it. Only fair considering I've had about three hours of sleep in the last two days. Time to go and catch up on that a bit; those belltowers wait for nobody.


November 13th

What do you know-- you can definitely hear the bells, all five or six different varieties, but either because I was completely exhausted or because they are just all fairly mellifluous, it didn't give me any trouble. We'll see how that continues in the future.

Florence, Italy, November 12th, 2011

I have... a lot of words of trip diary, so I'll put it up here in chunks, usually one day's entry at a time. A bit of context: this was the fourth time I'd been to Florence and by far the longest stay. Thrud has lived in Italy for job reasons on-and-off for a cumulative total of a little more than three years at this point, and has been there this time since June.


Firenze (November 12th, 2011)

I have just arrived in Florence, Italy, where I am visiting my housemate Thrud, whom some of you may know from her blog Ex Urbe (which I highly recommend). It was a long trip-- Washington, D.C. to Montreal to Munich to the Florence airport to the airport bus, which takes you to Santa Maria Novella train station, from which, paradoxically enough, we walked. The Florence airport is tiny and embarrassed and has a plethora of ways to get you to the train station as fast as possible, because it knows that's how you really ought to have come to town. I don't think I even saw any signs for Alitalia gates, just the Lufthansa flight that brought me in and the omnipresent-throughout-Europe Ryanair. Santa Maria Novella, on the other hand, is one of those imposing station-cum-mall-cum-monument things that is a center of city life and knows it, and this is as it should be.

Between the airport and the station is new Florence, which isn't much to look at, all modernist buildings in the same style, beige with balconies and extravagant roof gardens, and then one glorious head-turning moment where the modernist architect clearly went mad, threw down his plans for beige balcony after beige balcony, and said “all right, now we're going to do things my way, and my way is ROUND and CHOCOLATE BROWN with POINTY SHINY BITS and LOTS OF ARTILY ANGLED GLASS and also CHROME oh all right I realize it's in the contract you can have your balconies BUT WE ARE PAINTING THE IRONWORK LIME GREEN IN PROTEST”. I really liked that building; it was the architectural equivalent of a temper tantrum.

After the station you are in the old city, the Renaissance city which is all of a piece with itself, the maze of little streets and littler streets and astounding giant monuments and infinite churches which make up the Republic. I have walked into the plaza of Santa Maria della Fiore, the famous Duomo, from every possible angle-- there aren't that many alleys and streets which let out into it-- and it is not physically possible for the building not to come as a surprise. The streets around it are so narrow that you can't see the thing until you are suddenly there: one moment it's the cobbled lane full of about five lanes of traffic (two car, which is improbable enough, plus bicycle, pedestrian, Vespa, and occasionally something weird like horse) and the next moment it's The Largest Dome, looking down at you sleepily from its red, sunlit heights and mentioning that you, personally, are tiny next to the labor of the thousands (not to mention Brunelleschi). To get to Thrud's apartment you go between the Baptistery and the Duomo, past the column of poor neglected Saint Zenobius (Florence's patron saint, whom no one has particularly heard of), turn a couple of times until you get to the street with the best gelato shop in the city, go into an extremely imposing door with the knob solidly set in its middle to ensure you have no leverage, and then.

Well. It is a twelfth-century building. It's been divided and subdivided, of course, not to mention replastered. Most places that have flights of stairs, you can look up and say, hey, that's a flight of stairs, I can see where that's going, it goes around. This one, the stairs go up, and then they wander off to the right, and then they go in a sort of S-shape, and then they meander through some brick arches for a while, and all the time you're going gee, this is really a lot of stairs, but I can see through the outside windows that the ceilings aren't very high, so what the hell have they got in here? Above-ground catacombs? And then the stairs loop some more, pass a few oddly shaped windows with spectacular views of the belltower of the Duomo framed by various gutters, and there are some locked metal grids and things in the walls, and anything you are carrying has now become your own, personal nemesis. There are eight flights. Eight.

The apartment at the top is worth it: windows in absolutely all directions, from which you can see all five or six belltowers which will start up at seven in the morning, and the least stupid bathroom I have met in Italy, and a roof terrace; a high crow's nest of odd cubbies and antique wood crammed up against new linoleum. It's one of those places which never stops feeling high up even if all the windows are shut and curtained.

Down the street and round the corner is O' Vesuvio, which is where one goes for Neapolitan pizza if one does not want it authentically Neapolitan (in actual Naples, the pizza is a) not that great and b) served by people who are growling at you). This is where one goes for pizza with fresh mozzarella, porcini, finely shredded parsley, and precisely the right quantity of garlic; Thrud told me to get them to add chopped tomatoes and was correct. Pizza like this does not exist in the U.S. Period. It is food-coma pizza, the kind of food that you can't ever stop paying attention to, where even after you get used to the flavor it's so profoundly fascinating that you keep forgetting what you are having a conversation about. The shop has an oven half-hidden under teetering stacks of stone, a do-it-yourself-if-you-want-it-done-but-we-still-love-you-customers aesthetic, and interior décor that could not possibly have been planned or considered for one second by anyone ever. There is actual laundry actually hanging from the actual ceiling. About eight euros a (one-person) pie and it is definitively world-class pizza.

Then we went to Per che non, which is the best gelato shop in Florence, and got the obligatory fruiti di bosco. This means 'woodland fruits', and it's blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, redcurrants, and magic. Even Giolitti's, which is the best gelateria in Rome and therefore probably in the world, does not have fruiti di bosco like that, because Per che's tastes as though someone hand-picked the very best possible of each kind of fruit-- which is probably exactly what happened-- and then, possibly using some kind of holy relic or mystical ray, went through and made the whole thing synergetically better. You get three flavors in a cup, so I also got the fiori di latte (whipped-cream-flavored ice-cream, which sounds like a terrible idea but works very well; I have however been spoiled by the memory of Giolitti's version, so this, which was only excellent, was somewhat disappointing) and the kaki (Japanese persimmon, and yes, that was everything I like about kaki but without the part where it explodes all over you when you open it with a spoon).

Afterward, went and became a Friend of the Uffizi. This is where you go and pay sixty euros to get into a whole list of museums in Florence and surrounding environs for a calendar year and, which is a bit more important, mostly get to skip the line. Plus a neat little card with a Botticelli on it, and the chance to say you're a member of the Uffizi.

Then grocery shopping-- heirloom tomatoes twice the size and half the price of the ones at home, smelling ambrosial; kaki, because; mozzarella di bufalo, because. Dinner was the tomatoes chopped and fried with shaved garlic, salt, and ground black pepper over bucatini, the noodle that looks like thick spaghetti with a hole through it like a drinking straw. A little basil from the roof garden, a little parmesan.

It was upon sitting in the after-dinner chatting phase and eating the croissants papersky got for Thrud in Montreal that I realized that I was sitting and eating croissant from Marché Atwater in Montreal and mozzarella di bufalo from that morning's batch near Florence at the same time, which is so clearly ludicrous that I decided I had probably fallen asleep some time ago without noticing it. Only fair considering I've had about three hours of sleep in the last two days. Time to go and catch up on that a bit; those belltowers wait for nobody.


November 13th

What do you know-- you can definitely hear the bells, all five or six different varieties, but either because I was completely exhausted or because they are just all fairly mellifluous, it didn't give me any trouble. We'll see how that continues in the future.

You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are comments over there.