Duomo
The next morning we pack into John and Meredith’s rental Fiat, a small little Panda which barely accommodates the four of us and our luggage in Tetris fashion. For a day, our paths will coincide to the nearby city of Florence, and we partake in a short road trip through the Tuscany countryside with our LA neighbors. The main highways are all toll roads in Italy, and are well maintained and serviced as a result. Rest stops loom above the highway and are well equipped with shops and eateries in the latest fashion. Restrooms don’t have seats however, so suddenly one must engage the quad muscles in a hover fashion like women over the basin in order to complete one’s business.
Florence is a warm, typical mediterranean looking city has more resemblance to a living museum then anything else, it’s apartments built up solidly some three to four stories, betraying the population density and sophistication that existed in this city six hundred years before. It is warm though, resembling east LA in climate, and the Italians are suitably tanned as a result. Indeed, I run across “gone tanning” signs in shop windows, whether in mockery or sincerity I can’t tell, but it does underly the truth of the country.
We set to explore the city and sites, and immediately are oppressed by the overwhelming presence of the Duomo, which I take to mean two domes. Apparently, there is an inner dome, and an outer dome, one supporting the other. The Duomo is a gothic cathedral done in particularly vibrant colors, even garish by gothic standards. Though the structure is impressive in the extreme, I feel that something is missing by the fact that it rests on ground level with the street, something of this size and massiveness feels deserving of some sort of raised structure to accommodate the structure appropriately. The structure is incredibly huge, a massive Renaissance block of marble and brick that boasts the first dome in the world completed since the fall of the Roman empire some one thousand years before.
We pause for a moment in a crowded square next to a Medici palace of some sort, it’s a curious looking thing, part church, part palatial apartments, and part fort, the entire structure defies immediate classification. Even more confusing, the structure boasts an Italian and European Union flag… With a US flag flying high above.
“What in the world is our flag doing up there?” I ask bewilderedly.
“Haven’t you heard of 9/11?,” John replies. I facepalm stupidly, unable to believe I’ve forgotten, and impressed that the Italians haven’t.
The Leonardo museum is a rather lame affair, but the Galileo museum makes up for it, packed with intricate scientific instruments that led to the verification of a heliocentric universe. Here we also witness elaborate wax sculptures of complicated childbirths made more then two hundred years before. The dawn of modern anatomy comes with particularly brutal visualizations of forceps inserted into the vagina to enable extraction of difficult births. The procedures and tools seem barely helpful, and gives explanation to the necessity of cesarian section.
Eventually it’s late in the afternoon, and we stop for beer and pizza. The beer is italian, so is nothing special in nature, but in the sweltering Tuscany heat, is well appreciated, and strangely, as the trip progresses, I come to prefer Moretti’s particularly unimpressive heritage. A full liter goes down my gullet, with an unsatisfying margarita pizza that I expected to resemble some sort of caprese but instead has more in common with a basic cheese pizza.
We leave to view the Pitti Palace, but are disappointed when we find it closed; it is at this point that my bladder comes knocking, hard. The party decides that we need to head back to our hotel, and by the end of the journey, my bladder is so distended that I’m sweating bullets from every pore in my body, trying to dissipate the excess moisture. The self-discipline pays off, and I make it to a urinal in time but the relief is so relaxing, that I pass out back in the hotel after the hair raising experience. Note to self, holding a liter of liquid in your body for sixty minutes is about as exhausting as any sexual activity I’ve ever performed. Bee Jin is much amused by the whole performance, especially when she reveals that I’m running around with a map of all the public restrooms in Florence after the fact.
When I do come to, we head out to dinner, another mediocre experience. The server tries to sell us on secondis and what have you, but I’m unwilling to pursue mediocrity further, and stick to putting the minimal amount of food into my gullet. Gelato and small meals is my formula at this point. Though not the largest fan of ice cream and sweets, my grading scale is a lot less critical at the moment, and the sweet coolness is a relief in the heat that follows us around the living museum.
Florence at sunset
