Today is packing day. Cinzia washed all our clothes yesterday in our tiny washing/drying machine. Our landlord Cecilia will be here at 6pm to look the place over and calculate our utility bill. We have tickets on the “fast train” to Rome tomorrow at 1:10pm and will arrive at 2:45pm. It’s 9am now. Cinzia is still sleeping. We’ll hit the Mercato Centrale one last time to pick up something for lunch and get some cheese and fruit for dinner. We’ve had a great time here in Florence and are looking forward to Rome.
With so few days left here in Florence we created a small calendar on the back of a piece of paper with notes in each box so we don’t forget anything. Today is Thursday the 27th and the box says “Shopping and Arno Dinner @ 8:30pm”. The restaurant is our last GroupOn here in Florence at a restaurant on the Arno River. This means most of my day is free until dinner time.
We started yesterday off with a lunch at Trattoria Mario. We went there on Friday for the first time and enjoyed their fish menu, but wanted to try it on a non-fish day. I had a rib-eye steak and Cinzia had bollito. All very tasty and it seemed to be quite the foodie place to go. We shopped for paper for Cinzia during the day with a stop at Gelateria Porta Romana, which is perhaps the furthest gelateria from our apartment, but the 1.5 mile walk to get there was worth it. Cinzia found several hand-painted Florentine papers to bring back home to use on scrapbook pages and greeting cards. The 70cm x 50cm sheets aren’t cheap. We got one for €10 and five others for €35 – that’s over $60 worth of paper, but it makes her happy. She just loves cutting up paper and putting them back together, that’s what I tell her. For dinner we had picked up some things from the Mercato Centrale to prepare: veal parm, tomato salad, and rosemary potatoes. Cinzia even bought a few fresh porcini mushrooms, picked that day, to sauté for herself.
I've been busy posting more photos. There's still a backlog, but I added photos from Florence for the period of 8-18 October and added a page in the Photo Gallery from our day trip to San Miniato.
After returning from San Miniato on Sunday we slept in this morning, getting up with enough time to head out to the market and pick up some things for lunch and dinner before it closed for the day. Lunch today will be bruschetta and for dinner this evening we’ll have fresh spinach and ricotta ravioli with walnut sauce. We just finished lunch so I thought I’d sit down and write a quick blog – not focusing on any one topic.
Today we decided to walk to the top of Brunelleschi’s Dome. This is the huge dome atop the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. The first stone was laid on September 9th, 1296, and the structure completed in 1436 with the building of the great dome, designed by Filippo Brunelleschi. Once the structure was complete it was decorated throughout the next 4 centuries culminating with the green, white, and pink marble façade in 1887. The frescos adorning the huge dome were painted between 1568 and 1579 by Giorgio Vasari.
Italy’s big cities are a swarming mass of humanity. Everyone flocks to see its art, eat its food, or sell their wares. Among these are two groups of people that hide in plain sight – the gypsy women and the men from Senegal. Both are looking to make a buck any way they can.
On Monday morning Cinzia and I went to visit the Palazzo Medici Riccardi. It’s right around the block. We pass by it every day. It was time we had a look inside. It’s still used as an administrative building by the city of Florence. In some rooms you’ll find the unusual combination of a modern city council lecture hall set inside a room with Renaniance tapestries hanging from the walls or stunning frescos on the ceilings. The big draw is the cappella whose frescoed walls are the masterpiece of Benozzo Gozzoli.
As you have seen from the photos of our apartment, if you look out our window towards the Piazza del Duomo you see the campanile, or bell tower. This was designed by Giotto who was made Master of the Works of the basilica in 1334 when he was 67 years old. The campanile was started in 1334. Giotto died four years later and the work wasn’t completed until 1359. Exterior statues were added over the years by various other Renaissance masters, notably Donatello, up until 1435. It rises 278 feet (lower than the 400 feet of Giotto’s original design when the spires were eliminated), has seven bells, and a total of 414 steps to reach the top level (118 more steps than the bell tower in Pisa). Its white, pink, and green marble exterior matches that of the basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore.
Cinzia is always looking for new markets to visit. One of the bigger ones is the Sant’ Ambrogio Market. It’s located in one of the neighborhoods that is a bit off the tourist path, so we were excited to see more local flavor. There was a meat and seafood market in a central building surrounded on three sides by outdoor stalls of vendors selling clothing, house wares, linens, toys, and assorted fruits and vegetables.
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