Florence

When we started this trip three months ago, the pandemic was still very much a thing and most people were not quite ready to travel again. And some of our destinations, like Graz, Ljubljana, and Trieste, aren’t exactly tourist magnets to begin with. So we often had the pleasure of being some of only a handful of visitors—and very often the only Americans. That all changed when we got to Venice in early June. And when we left there three days later, we were surprised to find that almost everybody else on our carriage was American. We felt like we’d somehow ended up on a tour bus. Meh.

But if the company inside the train was uninspiring, the countryside outside made up for it. The fairly flat terrain of northeastern Italy quickly gave way to the rolling hills of Tuscany, and they’re every bit as gorgeous as you’ve heard. All was lush and green at the end of spring and more forested than I expected. In between the stands of trees, farm fields stretched out in every direction. Countless old stone villages, churches, and castles perched atop hills and cliffs. Ribbons of those iconic, exceedingly erect Italian cypress trees demarcated roads and lanes. It was lovely.

Now seems like as good a time as any to provide some background on our destination, the legendary Florence (Firenze). The city is situated pretty much right in the middle of the Italian peninsula, not close to a sea or anything important, but on the way to lots of things. so Julius Caesar built a city here in 59 BC. (I don’t think much remains, but we did see some interesting excavations of it underneath the cathedral.) Florentia became a prosperous trading center at first, but went through some hard times over the coming centuries, perhaps even coming close to being abandoned. But starting around 1000 AD, it gained importance in the region of Tuscany and swelled in size and success, due to its textile industry and merchants—and banking. Florentine money—in the form of the gold florin—emerged as perhaps the most important currency in Europe in the Middle Ages, and financed industries across the continent and in Britain. As a result, by the early 15th century, Florence had become one of the largest and richest cities in Europe and a major financial center, exercising enormous influence.

But among Florentines, the most powerful and influential were the Medici family, and from this point forward, the city’s history is inextricably tied up with theirs. Their banking empire included branches from London to Rome and counted kings and popes amongst its clientele. Several members of the family became popes themselves, and one became a queen of France. Meanwhile, through a turbulent political history, the Medicis ruled over Florence either behind the scenes or explicitly as dukes almost without interruption for 300 years. They were patrons of the sciences and arts, making lavish investments in art pieces that are now legendary. Due in large part to the Medicis, Florence became a major scientific, artistic, and cultural center and gave birth to the Italian Renaissance. It was the home of Galileo for the last decade of his life. and can claim master artists such as da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Botticelli as its own. (The last Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Raphael, was from Urbino next door, but spent a lot of time in Florence.) The city also produced writers and poets such Dante (and Machiavelli), and their masterpieces probably had a lot to do with why the Florentine dialect became the Italian language now spoken throughout the country. Florence even served briefly as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy in the 19th century.

Of course, a lot of that creative energy was invested in building the city itself, including landmarks such as the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral, nicknamed Il Duomo for its huge dome, and the Palazzo Vecchio (“old palace”), home to the Medici family for 350 years and later the city hall. In fact, the entire historic center of Florence, most of which was built during the Renaissance, has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. So yeah…Florence is not only an important place; it’s supposedly a beautiful and charming one too.

With this in mind, it was rather jarring when we rolled into the Florence railway station, a tired old brown box that nobody ever called beautiful or charming, and stepped off the air conditioned train into the sweltering, sticky heat. As we hauled our luggage the couple of blocks to our apartment, I realized that whatever neighborhood we were staying in, it was definitely not featured in the tourist brochures. Cars, buses, and motorcycles jammed the narrow streets, the sound of horns and motorcycles filled the air, and the smell of trash and piss filled our nostrils. I had visions in my head of what this glorious city would be like…and they didn’t look anything like this.

Now that my mom was gone and we were back on our own, Amy had reserved a much smaller and more economical Airbnb, selected more for its proximity to the station than its amenities. It was adequate, but so small that we couldn’t open our luggage in the bedroom, and had to use the entire floor of the combined kitchen/living room for that. There was no air conditioning in the bedroom, and opening the windows didn’t provide much relief, but did provide the opportunity to hear every word spoken by the neighbors in the courtyard below. There was no washing machine and we were out of clean clothes, so I sought out a crowded laundromat nearby while Amy and Griffin tried to find somewhere to eat.

After a not especially auspicious start, we figured we would use what was left of the afternoon venturing out to the riverfront, where we expected to find some lovely shady avenues along the picturesque Arno. Again, reality didn’t match expectations. The river through Florence is wide, shallow, and brown, with copious weeds growing around the edges but not a single tree to be found anywhere. With no refuge from the sun there, we got a gelato (which the Florentines supposedly invented) and tried to find a public park. But central Florence has no real public parks. It does have several private, walled ones, some of which you can pay to enter, but they were all closing now, and I resented the idea of having to pay for a park (and thought longingly of Vienna and its wealth of lush, green, free parks for all). After wandering a bit through the Oltrarno neighborhood, we found our way to the gates of the rather ugly Pitti Palace, the former home of the Medicis, with its wide, gravely, and strangely treeless front courtyard. (Do trees not grow in this city? Or do Florentines just have something against them?)

From there, it was only a couple of blocks back to the Arno and the iconic Ponte Vecchio (“old bridge”), lined on both sides with two- and three-story jewelry shops and packed with tourists, snapping bad selfies in the glaring sun. I was intrigued to see the Vasari Passage running atop the bridge, which is an elaborate, hidden-in-plain-sight secret corridor that connects the Pitti Palace across the river to the old Medici offices, now the Uffizi Gallery, and the Palazzo Vecchio. The architect Vasari built this for his Medicis so they could sneak between the three buildings where they spent most of their time without stepping foot outside or encountering their enemies. Dan Brown made this passageway famous in his book Inferno (named, of course, after Dante’s Inferno), and this blog has a good description and drawing of it. Unfortunately, it’s currently closed to the public. Drat.

Hot, sweaty, and tired from the actual inferno outside, we headed back to our apartment and researched what to do the next day. Rude awakening: popular sites like the Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace were all booked up, and there’s no getting in unless you bought tickets weeks in advance. So this is what it’s like to travel during Europe’s high season. Frustrated, I finished the night re-watching the film version of Inferno (which isn’t nearly so bad as reviews suggest).

We had only two more days to explore the city, during which we circumnavigated the old town on foot, tried to avoid the heat, and explored the sites that we could get into. Here are the highlights:

• While everybody wants to climb to the top of the mammoth dome of the cathedral, the 14th century Giotto Bell Tower, called the most beautiful campanile in Italy, isn’t nearly so popular. We were able to get right in and climb the steep, claustrophobic, often circular stone staircases embedded in the walls all the way to the roof, 278 feet off the ground, for some of the best views in the city. Griffin scaled it like a boss.
• We also ventured into the cathedral itself, somehow bypassing the long line by entering through a side door. This is one of the largest churches in the world, but it’s the dome that gets all the attention. Turns out the inside of the place isn’t nearly so spectacularly ornate as one might expect, but the atmosphere was nonetheless pretty stupendous due to a tsunami of live organ music that filled the air.
• Across the crowded square, we also walked right into the octagonal Baptistry of St. John, one of the oldest buildings in the city, constructed between 1059 and 1128. I found it more interesting than the Duomo, with a huge mosaiced figure of Christ, accented in gold leaf, staring down at you from inside the dome, surrounded by a parade of other important dudes from Christendom.
• Florence boasts not one, but two, museums dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci, and the second one is aimed at children, with re-creations of dozens of his most famous machines that you can play with. After two hours here, I practically had to drag Griffin out, and he keeps asking to go back!
• Nearby, there’s also a considerably sillier “Selfie Museum” where Amy and Griffin spent a good hour playing in ball pits and getting up to other hijinks while I roasted alive outside.
• There’s also a very serious museum dedicated to Galileo Galilei, containing several floors of beautiful vintage maps and globes and incredible telescopes and other scientific devices, hand-crafted from brass, wood, and glass by Galileo and his contemporaries. Did I mention they also have one of his fingers on display? Unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly so kid-friendly, so we didn’t stay long.
• Down the street, we dined at a place that Amy can’t stop talking about, Brac, part upscale vegetarian café and part airy bookstore.
• Afterwards, we rushed off for the only activity that I was somehow able to book on short notice, a “Secret Passageways” tour of the Palazzo Vecchio. A wonderful guide led us and another American family through hidden rooms and staircases within the walls used by the Medicis. Sadly, the Vasari Passageway was not included. But we did get to go inside the roof to see the massive timbers supporting the paintings on the ceiling of the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred), a huge room modeled on the Chamber of the Great Council at the Doge’s Palace in Venice. (This room, and the roof, also figured into Dan Brown’s Inferno.)
• On our last morning, we ventured out on a local bus for a roundabout drive around the south of the city, following the medieval walls, where we suddenly discovered forested hills studded with beautiful villas, a leafy green paradise. Were we still in Florence? We were, as we discovered minutes later when we popped out at the Piazzale Michelangelo, a grand 19th century plaza that overlooks the city (where most photos you’ve seen of the city were likely taken). We enjoyed cappuccinos and croissants at a leisurely café and enjoyed the view, realizing that there was more to Florence than just its historic city center…though most tourists don’t venture beyond that. Afterwards, we threaded our way through a quaint public rose garden, discovered a wonderful manmade grotto and waterfall underneath the Piazzale Michelangelo, then followed the rather ugly river back into town.

If you haven’t gotten the gist yet, I was pretty disappointed in Florence. Though it has an illustrious past, I don’t love what it is now. For a city that had, at least during the Renaissance, been bursting at the seams with genius and talent, very little of it seems to have been channeled into good urban planning. The city center is almost utterly devoid of trees and greenery, which makes it also devoid of birds or wildlife, and a big stone oven in the summer. The architecture is beautiful, of course, but gets sorta monotonous. Tuscany can be quite leafy and gorgeous, as I’d learned on the train ride there, but the Florentines are apparently so enamored all of their manmade beauty that they left no space within their walls for natural beauty; and they’re so fixated on their glorious past that they have invested little into modern improvements. Florence is basically just a big museum, an homage to another time. If you’re a lover of art or history, it’s definitely worth a visit, but please come in the spring or fall, and stay somewhere outside the city center. Or at least complement your stay with a few days in the countryside. (And don’t forget to book your museum tickets a few weeks in advance!)

Next stop: the eternal city, Rome!