I’ve been in Venice for about twelve hours and I love it. There’s one path that runs from the train station to the Piazza San Marco that is basically lined with tourist traps. Yawn. But what makes Venice cool is if you deviate from the path by just a block you’re totally screwed. Where are you? Who knows? Even having a map doesn’t help, since every street is about two feet wide and half a block long. No exaggeration. And the streets are made of water! Whose genius idea was that?
Obviously, I left the path. So many times I ended up on the wrong bridge, seeing the right bridge less than 20 feet away, and I had to walk a quarter mile to get back to it. Brilliant. I’m going to get a summer home here just so I can laugh at all the lost tourists. But I did discover the mask shop that made the masks for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. Forget the tourist junk – I got the good stuff.
Oh, and the gelato here costs half as much as in Florence. I love this city.
Photos from Florence will be coming as soon as I have a reliable internet connection.
But that’s it for Florence for me. It’s nice, but it’s a tourist trap. I’m off to Venice in a couple hours, which I’m told will be even worse. But I’ll push through it and get to Rome. Right now I’m running on nothing but adrenaline and gelato.
One thing I will say for Florence – I love the street performers here! I heard an opera singer in the Piazza della Republica who made me cry. Now I want to learn to sing.
The less I know about a city, the more I enjoy exploring it. I didn’t know anything about Florence when I arrived other than there was some building here called “Il Duomo”. The internet doesn’t seem to have made it here, either, so I had no guides or anything. With the tight work schedule, it was all I could do to get my trains and hostels booked – forget planning my sightseeing.
So today I took off blindly into Florence. I had the map on the back of an advertisement flyer for a bike tour, so I wasn’t completely lost – just mostly. But I was able to find my way to the Duomo. It’s BEAUTIFUL. I walked around the corner and stopped in my tracks. Unlike Notre Dame and the other monuments I’m used to seeing, it’s made of marble – red, green, and pink, with incredibly ornate details everywhere. It’s absolutely stunning. And the surprises continued throughout the day.
I found another building that looked pretty from the outside so I walked in. Turns out I found the tombs of Michaelangelo, Galileo, and Machiavelli, among others. And it happens to be down the street from the best gelato store in Florence, which I discovered on my way to the Ponte Vecchio, which was cool but lined with shops way outside my price range.
So I headed to the Piazzale Michaelangelo. I didn’t know what it was, but I like Michaelangelo, so I figured I’d see it. Talk about timing! The Piazzale Michaelangelo is a park on a huge hill overlooking Florence and I arrived right at sunset – just in time to see the sun light up the red roofs of the city.
A satisfying day, indeed.
I’ve been in Florence for a day already and I still don’t know whether Italians drive on the right or the left side of the street. Apparently the rules are flexible.
I checked into my room, turned on my computer. “No wireless networks in range.” I’m in the third world! So now I’m sitting in the Piazza Dell’Unita Italiana, paying for access to a wireless access point that’s so weak that I’m practically sitting in the street. I’m literally sitting on the ground next to a roadblock as people walk by, stare at what I’m writing, and mutter things in Italian. So if it takes me a little while to respond to email, bear with me.
On the bright side, the gelato here is fantastic.
I met a lot of people out tonight who come into London from the suburbs so they can go out Saturday night. A cab from London to the suburbs costs a few hundred dollars. My God. You’d have to take a second job just to be able to GET to the bar at night, let alone buy a drink.
