Italy – Where is Phil now?

Florence, day two

Friday 20 October 2023 – Florence.

After the big day of walking and sightseeing yesterday it was a relief to be able to take it easy today. Without any time restricted bookings ahead we took a leisurely and enjoyable breakfast on the balcony of the hotel. It’s a nice to place to relax but the weather hasn’t really allowed us to make proper use of it before now. The ticket for the Uffizi yesterday also gave us access to Boboli Gardens and Palazzo Pitti, both nearby and on our side of the River Arno. We set out for our morning mission to visit them both once our breakfast had settled.

We really enjoyed the gardens, they are huge, though appear to be suffering in parts from the very dry weather. I imagine maintaining such a vast, and popular site is not easy in these times of uncertain weather. We entered from what possibly is considered the back entrance, though it had a great view up the central path leading up a hill which overlooked the river and central Florence, with views similar to those yesterday from Piazza Michelangelo.

There were a few statues scattered around the gardens, and I particularly liked the one that looks like two blokes doing the ‘holding up the Leaning Tower’ pose we saw so much of earlier in the week.

We had arrived at the gardens not too long after opening and it was very quiet, though as time passed and we got closer to the Pitti Palace the number of visitors grew.

There is a grotto in the gardens I wanted to see, though I was a little disappointed when I found it. Though it turns out there are two grottos and I had found the smaller one, the ‘Grotta di Madama, rather than the more impressive Grotta di Buontalenti. Both were built late in the 16 Century. Madama is presumed to reference Maria Maddalena the wife of Cosimo Medici who the gardens were originally designed for.

Purchased in 1550, the Palace was chosen by Cosimo Medici as the new Grand Ducal residence, and it soon became the new symbol of the Medici’s power over Tuscany. It also housed the Court of other two dynasties: the House of Habsburg-Lorraine (which succeeded the Medici from 1737) and the Kings of Italy from the House of Savoy, who inhabited it from 1865. Nonetheless the palace still bears the name of its first owner, the Florentine banker Luca Pitti that in the mid-1400s started its construction. It’s a fabulous huge building containing five different art museums. It was my favourite of the galleries in Florence, perhaps because I had no expectations compared to what I had for the others.

The art was secondary to the interior decoration, the walls and ceilings are just beautifully painted, admittedly extremely excessive and over the top, but glorious still.

For such a huge patron of the arts there are few works that feature Cosimo, and here he is looking quite imperious.

We found an exhibition in the Russian Art gallery with these giant stiletto shoes made entirely from pots and pot lids by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, they looked amazing and were a highlight of all the galleries we visited.

We left the Pitti Palace and stopped for a pasta lunch in one of the squares on the way back to our hotel. I love outside eating, glass of wine and some pasta. I could do this every day. This was definitely a tourist priced trattoria, but the food was very nice. Walking back to the hotel I found a few more of the shrines I’ve been enjoying over the past couple of days.

After an afternoon rest we went back across the River Arno to Florence’s centre in search of the buchetta del vino, the wine wall, we passed yesterday. It is top of my list of things to do in Florence. We found it easily enough but annoyingly it didn’t appear open.

It was too early to eat so we wandered about the centre of Florence for a while, pretty randomly will say, finally stumbling on a few streets with shops that weren’t global brands. I was looking for corduroy trousers, though I didn’t find any that fitted that I liked. There are some very well dressed men in Florence, I would guess most of those were local, us tourists are way more casual! Completely by accident we found an open wine wall, yay! We had to queue for a few minutes and received our glasses of wine just as the heavens opened and it poured. We joined some of the other wine window guests standing in a small private car park out of the rain. It was very nice, proper stemmed glass as well, none of the plastic cups you would get in England.

Naturally we didn’t have umbrellas today. Once the worst of the downpour had passed we started the walk toward the hotel.

Crossing the Arno again I spotted a small murmation of, I guess swifts, over one of the other bridges and we stopped to watch them as they flitted back and forth across the bridge. Our dinner was taken in a small local restaurant as the rain was coming down quite heavily and we didn’t want to go to far. It was our first non-vegetarian meal in Florence and I had fish which was really nice. Annoyingly the rain would remain for most of tomorrow, our last day in Italy.

Another fabulous day I love Florence!

Florence, day one

Thursday 19 October 2023 – Florence.

It continued to rain overnight but we were fortunate during the day and I rarely needed to use the umbrella I borrowed from the hotel after stupidly leaving mine at home. It was a really busy day with pre-booked tickets to two of the big attractions; the Accademia and Uffizi Galleries. Our entry time for the Accademia was at 9:15 so we had a hurried continental style breakfast in the hotel; cold meats, cheese, pastries and bread etc, all washed down with a good cup of coffee, or three. I liked it.

It rained enough on the 30 minute walk to find the ticket office to need the umbrella and get some rain on the cobbles, yay!

High on my list of minor things to see or do in Florence was to find a buchetta del vino, or wine window and I was surprised to find one as we walked to the ticket office. It was too early in the day for it to be open so we made a note of the location with the intention of going back later.

We walked past the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore when we took a slight mis-turn, and wow! What an amazing building. We didn’t have tickets for this and it has been left on the list of things to do when we come back to Florence, which is something I want to do.

The Accademia was impressive! I guess its main reason for being a huge tourist attraction is it has the original Michelangelo David statue; and boom! it’s pretty much the first thing you see once you get through the front door. The statue is impressive, it’s much bigger than I expected, and yes the hands are weirdly large, but it is a beautiful thing and I was surprised about how few people were in the room. I expected it to be packed. Like the experience in Pisa, not overcrowding a venue because you can, makes visiting attractions much more pleasant.

The Accadamia is big; there is lots of renaissance art; there are spectacular pieces by loads of well known artists, but it’s not a period I really like. I mean the art is amazing, beautiful and it’s so good to be able to be up close to it, but I wasn’t wowed by it. I liked this work of Michelangelo’s that was in a series of statues that he had started but never finished before leaving Florence to Rome in 1534.

There were a lot tour bus tourists and it was interesting watching them file in and out of the gallery without going up to the first floor with its large collection of religious works from before the renaissance. I quite like some of the work from this period; it’s quite ‘simple’ and almost cartoony in a way. I was reading a book about the Medici before and while we were away and it noted that Cosimo Medici was torn between the strict Catholicism of 14^th century Italy and Humanism, and during his time as the head of the Medici family and their vast investment in art religious that human figures started to appear more natural and less ‘cartoony’.

After leaving the Accademia we wandered around in many different circles, walking up streets and lanes as they took our fancy. This is what I like most about holidaying. We stopped for coffee outside a church with a memorial to Dante.

There are a lot of what I’m calling shrines in Florence and they are very well cared for and I absolutely love these early forms of street art.

The Porta del Paradiso aka the Gates of Paradise, are found on the back of the baptistery, opposite the cathedral and they are stunning, though the original gates are in a museum. Created by the goldsmith and sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti between 1425 and 1452 the gates are stunning with beautiful motifs of scenes from the bible.

The weather was still in pour favour so walked up to the Piazzale Michelangelo on the far side of the River Arno.

It was a steep, short walk up this magnificent viewing point over Florence and a copy of the Michelangelo’s David Statue.

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We could see very dark clouds looming over the far side of the city so decided to head back down and get back to the centre before the rain returned; and for the pre-booked visit to the famous Uffizi Gallery.

The gallery is amazing, again, not too crowded but enough people to give a buzz.

The building is beautiful, with lovely ceilings, walls and everything surrounding the treasured works of art in the gallery, including a couple of lovely Botticelli works from the late 15 century.

We took a slow stroll back to the hotel after the Uffizi. Walking the streets is such a joy; the cobbles, the narrow alleys between tall buildings, the small number of cars, the random pieces of art, so many things that make strolling an obvious first choice. We took a rest for a while before heading out early in the evening for dinner in another excellent vegetarian restaurant ; L’OV Osteria.

It was another lovely day. I’m really enjoying our Italian stay!

Pisa to Florence

Wednesday 18 October 2023 – Florence.

As anticipated the rain came in the early hours and was still with us when we got up. With no early attractions booked and a checkout at 10:00 there was no need to move fast. We had breakfast at the same café as yesterday, and we had the same breakfast, though unlike yesterday the place was packed. I guess no-one was rushing out into the weather. We were very pleased we had the opportunity to climb the Leaning Tower yesterday when it was sunny. I discovered this morning that I’d left my umbrella at home. I realised I hadn’t packed in the middle of the night the night before we left but had completely forgotten I’d had that thought by the time I got up. At least I’d remember to pack a rain coat, or two.

After breakfast we packed and then took a rapid walk, sheltering where possible, to Pisa Station to get a train to Florence. We were lucky and got most of the way to the station between heavy showers, though the last 100 yard dash was in a sudden downpour.

We’ve taken the approach of dealing with today one action a time rather than trying to book and plan things ahead, so we arrived at the station with no stress about getting pre-paid tickets and finding a specific train. As expected it was all very easy and there were plenty of working ticket machines and they were simple to use. Train travel in Italy (like all of Europe) is significantly cheaper and easier than the UK. It poured with rain all the way to Florence, but I didn’t care.

I was kinda of expecting the view from the train to be all beautiful Tuscan villages and green rolling hills layered in vines and fruit and olive trees. For the first quarter of the journey we seemed to be passing industrial estates, (yeah, yeah). It was not as scenic as expected. There wasn’t a lot of interesting things to see but I enjoyed gazing out the window anyway.

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The journey to Florence took an hour and it was still raining when we arrived. We had planned to get a bus from the station to the hotel we had booked so joined the queue for the bus ticket machine. It was slow, then got slower and more and more people crowded around trying to help those in front to get tickets; it turned it had basically stopped working. We both downloaded the bus company app to our phones and I managed to get a reliable enough connection to pay for two tickets. Annoyingly the tickets didn’t arrive in the app, grrr. I tried again with a different card and the same happened. Double grrr, though the language actually used was a lot more ‘colourful’ shall we say. I wasn’t a happy bunny. We thought sod it, lets take a cab, but the cab queue was absolutely huge; apparently there was a big football related event at the Fiorentina stadium out of town and all the cabs were taken up ferrying big wigs out there. Eleanor managed to actually buy two tickets for the bus on her phone so we joined the bus queue.

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There was a sign board telling when buses were coming though it was as useless as the app. I got grumpy standing in the rain and when the bus arrived after 30 minutes t was packed; though we managed to squeeze on and our stop was only four away from the station on the far side of the River Arno, so it wasn’t terrible.

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The hotel Ad Astra was a two minute walk from the bus stop and I suspect they don’t get too many guests who arrive by bus carrying a wet backpack, though they were very welcoming! It’s a lovely place, our room was gorgeous and the staff are fabulous. the hotel backs onto the largest private garden in Florence, though the garden isn’t accessible by guests. It almost had a country villa feel to it. The presenter Clive Myrie stayed and filmed here when he made his recent BBC series on Italy,

After unpacking we had a glass of wine in a shelter on the hotel deck and unwound after the morning; writing notes, reading and gazing out over the very peaceful garden.. We had an early evening table booked in a vegetarian restaurant in a book shop so didn’t do much in the late afternoon before leaving for a slow walk to dinner.

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I’d loved Pisa and its lanes and old buildings, the slight smell of damp and sewers, its age and history, but it has nothing on Florence. Florence is just amazing and by the end I never wanted to leave. The Ad Astra is located on the southern side of the River Arno, the opposite side to the centre, in the Oltrarno district. It’s a nice area, old of course, less busy than the centre, but there are still nice places for coffee, wine and food. It is my sort of place and I would stay in Oltrarno again for sure. Like Pisa, Florence felt like a safe place to walk and get lost in, there always seemed to be others out walking the streets and at no time did I feel we were unsafe, it is a tourist town after all. Like Pisa there were few cars moving on the roads outside of the various rush hours and this made walking around almost a joy. There are still lots of motor scooters and cyclists, though in general they were polite and not intimidating.

We reached the Arno as the sun was dropping below the horizon, sadly not a night for a sunset over the Ponte Vecchio, Florence’s most well known and loveliest bridge.

We passed Plazzio Uffizi, which we will visit tomorrow, one of the many places I’m super excited about visiting over the next few days. The Uffizi Gallery is one of the major tourist attractions and we have pre-booked tickets for tomorrow afternoon.

Dinner at Libreria Brac was delicious, I wasn’t expecting to find excellent vegetarian or vegan food here as Tuscany is quite a meaty region. It was busy so must be doing something’s right. We had vin santo for desert and OMG! I’ve not had this before and can’t believe I’ve missed it for the 61 years I’ve been on earth. Vin santo (holy wine) is a luscious thick and very sweet, dessert wine, it comes with a small plate of cantuccini, a typical Italian hard biscuit, that you dunk into the wine and let it soak a bit before munching the biscuit. Lovely. I had it every night and it will be a Christmas treat this year.

With very full bellies it was a slow meander back to the hotel. There is always one more narrow street to take a photo of.

This bust is in the entrance to our hotel. The building has been owned by the same family for a very long time and I wonder if this was an ancestor?

I was loving Florence!

Pisa

Tuesday 17 October 2023 – Pisa.

I was surprised, and pleased, to wake up under a clear blue sky. It was unexpected as the forecast had shown rain for most of the week. The B and B room came with a voucher for a coffee, pastry and a glass of juice breakfast in a café around the corner. The café was very modern and could have been anywhere in the world, though it was the only really modern place we entered on the trip. I liked it and the coffee was superb; as was most of the coffee we had in Italy. Coffee is important, as is red wine, and I had lots good wine too; just not for breakfast.

Our first, and only appointment, of the day was a 9:15 visit to the Leaning Tower. We’d booked online for an early visit to get in before the rush. It was still busy, but not as busy as it was later in the day. We arrived early so took a walk around the site, popping outside the ancient city walls to look at the souvenir stalls (Messi, Neymar and Mbappe shirts. None of whom played football in Italy, let alone Florence). Eleanor was looking for a dayglo David statue, though she didn’t find one here.

I’m glad we got into the queue to enter the tower early as we were advised that bags were not allowed inside, and that free baggage storage was nearby. I should quickly note that the organisation at the big attractions we went to in both Pisa and Florence was utterly superb. Walking into the base of the tower I was surprised to see it was completely hollow, with just a stairwell winding round the empty core. What was very weird, though on reflection it should’ve been expected, is the floor slopes inside. It felt really odd walking into a building that sloped downhill.

Construction of this most famous of towers began in the twelfth century from a design by the architect Diotisalvi (possibly as there are contentions about the original architect) and it started to tilt almost immediately due to the soft ground it is built on.

The bell tower was added in 1372 to finish off the build. By the time remedial works starts in 1990 it was leaning at a precarious 5.5 degrees. It is now stable at 3.97 degrees, though it looks worse. There are seven bells in the tower, one for each musical note. The largest bell was installed in 1655.

Though free standing, it was built as the bell tower for the cathedral nearby, the construction of which started in 1064. It also tilts, but only slightly. The cathedral, tower, baptistery and the monumental cemetery make up the Piazza dei Miracoli, a UNESCO world heritage site, and it is all rather lovely. I wanted to visit the baptistery as it’s supposed to have the most magnificent interior of all the monuments, but it was closed in this off-season for renovation work.

There are 251 steps to the top of the tower and one bi-directional staircase. Visitor numbers are, as you would expect, restricted, so it wasn’t too busy, though passing those coming down as we headed up was tight in some spaces. There were some conveniently placed ‘viewing’ stops on the way up; puff, puff…

The view from the top was, as you’d imagine, wonderful. We were lucky with the day as the rest of the week was rainy or cloudy or both. We got the view. It was a little un-nerving standing outside at the top, when you leave the stairs you come out on to a fairly level platform, but as you walk round and get to the section where the tower is tilting down its slightly unpleasant. A narrow marble step, tilting down and eight storeys up. Not my thing. It was nice going back down to the ground. It was fantastic going up though; it’s a marvellous construction and should be on everyone’s to do list.

Back at ground level the tour bus tourists had arrived in force; there were thousands, and this is off-season. I wanted to mock the dozens of folk striking the various Instagramable ‘holding up the tower’ poses, but it was somewhat endearing, though I’m way too cool to do it myself, obviously.

After the rush of the tower and the exquisite view the cathedral was a little ‘meh’, maybe I’ve been in too many. I mean it’s huge and beautiful and the art is stupendous, but I’ve seen it all before; there was some repair work going on as well so scaffold all over the place and I guess that broke that special ambiance of sacred places. At least they didn’t have builders radio going.

The doors of the cathedral are fabulous, with intricate bronze carvings from 1602 in panels on all the doors. I particularly loved this panel where centuries of visitors have been rubbing the naked bum…

After collecting our bags from the baggage office and stopping for coffee and a snack at a nearby tourist joint (expensive) we took to the streets of old town Pisa and wandered randomly for a few hours. I very much enjoyed it.

We crossed the River Arno, which also flows through Florence, we will cross it a few times there as well, and took in an avantgarde exhibition in Palazzo Blu which was really interesting. other than the tower there was one other thing we both wanted to see in Pisa and that was Keith Haring’s Tuttomonda mural. Painted in 1989 it was one of the artist’s final works. It’s huge and rather beautiful and we return here on our final day.

We meandered back towards the B and B, ducking in and out of narrow cobbled streets as the fancy took us. I immensely enjoyed the walking in both Pisa and Florence; there are cars, just not many, and away from the main roads people mainly walk in the street. It’s the way it’s always been and will continue to be as more and more young folk (and some of the not so young) choose to not rely on a car to get around. I also enjoy walking down narrow lanes surrounded by 4 or 5 storey residential buildings; these places feel lived in with a sense of community and I always want to live in one. Though I know the ‘sense of community’ is likely just as much as a fantasy as my dream of a perfect local pub that only really exists on the telly; at least in England anyway. I particularly like the religious images on the walls, the small shrines, and the paintings with a donation slot on the side of churches. This is all so not-England, or New Zealand.

We stopped for lunch (gnocchi for me and a duck bolognaise for Eleanor) and a glass of wine or two in a café on a small square surrounded by young folk from the nearby university. It was entirely pleasant and energising, though we did go back to the B n B for a brief rest after eating. The B n B is just off another, larger square, through a small road arch with the most remarkable and faded painted ceiling that I know nothing about, and don’t want to. It looks very old and the fact it is just there in the street with cars and bikes and pedestrians passing through, or stopping for a smoke and shelter from the rain, is just lovely.

The building our room in has a small shrine on it.

Our final tourist activity was to head back to the Piazza del Miracoli (or Piazza del Duomo depending on who you read) to visit the Camposanto, the memorial cemetery. Construction started in 1277 to house the growing number of graves that were scattered around the cathedral grounds.

The frescoes that cover every wall were finally finished 200 years later. It was my favourite building in Pisa and I’m very glad we decided to visit. The frescoes are amazing and in hindsight I wish I’d spent more time looking at them. Work continues to restore the site and it seems to be being done very sensitively, the work done on the frescoes for instance looks almost as dated as the originals.

My favourite was the depiction of the torment of sinners in hell. It reminded me of similar works I saw in SE Asia and I love that no matter the religion there is always eternal damnation for those who transgress the, often arbitrary and confusing, rules.

The site houses numerous statues and memorials of wealthy and famous Pisans from the past, including Finobachi, the father of mathematics as we now know it. With Michelangelo, Galileo, De Vinci and others Tuscany was well endowed with visionaries.

There are a number of plague death victims here too. The plague didn’t really care who you were or how much money you had when it visited.

We wandered the streets again, stopping for a magnificent gelato before heading out for the evening. We hoped to find a bar to watch England host Italy in an international football match, but we didn’t have any luck so watched it on the TV in the room. We were exhausted and it was only day one, but man it was a good day. I really could holiday forever.

I will give a hard recommend for Pisa, and if you read this and want to visit, stay overnight and walk to the tower, it’s magnificent and comparatively peaceful; then book your tower visit early the following day.

A night in Pisa

Monday 16 October 2023 – Pisa.

I’ve not been to Italy since 1986, sort of. I spent 48 hours on a bus from Bari to London, after getting off a ferry from Athens in 1987, but I don’t recall anything more than getting off the ferry and taking a seat in on the bus. It was a long journey a long time ago. I’ve never been to Pisa, Florence or anywhere else in Tuscany. Weirdly Tuscany and its famous towns haven’t been very high on my ‘must visit’ list until recently, and I lay that positive change squarely at the feet of the actor Stanley Tucci and his fabulous recent BBC series on Italy through the lens of Italian food. Surely, Pisa’s famous leaning tower should have been on my list of wonders of the world/monumental architecture that I must visit, but it wasn’t. That was rather stupid.

Eleanor hasn’t been to Florence or Pisa either so it was the ideal location for a week way, cunningly planned by me to be at the end of the main tourist season, but the week before most schools have their mid-term break. It was so cunning that there were still thousands of people there, but not tens of thousands. I took too many photos and we had too good a time to try and fit things into a single post so this one will just cover the first day, or rather, night we spent in Pisa. I suspect the holiday will take a few days to write up and the photos even longer to edit. I’m happy to say it was a wonderful week away; other than the torrential rain on the last day.

I’ve been finding it difficult to book holidays these last couple of years, I’m wanting to be more eco-friendly and use trains were I can, I’m not worried about the slower journey, but Christ, going anywhere by train from the UK is expensive. Flights have gotten expensive as well, so it took an age to find something that suited our budget and timing, and my desire to never fly Ry*n Air or E*syJ*t again. We flew BA out of Heathrow on a very convenient mid-afternoon flight, arriving in Pisa just after dark. It’s much less stressful travelling later in the day.

We had a lovely room in a B and B a ten minute walk from the tower so set off soon after dropping our bags to get a quick glimpse before the tour we’ve booked for 9:15 tomorrow. We stopped for food and a drink on the way at a small osteria (a local wine bar serving simple food, usually without a menu). They only served one thing, a massive plate of cheese, preserved meat, olives and the local pomodoro, something I’ve never had before; a mix of tomato, garlic, olive oil and bread mashed into a gooey paste and spread on bread. With a glass of local red wine it was a perfect introduction to Tuscan eating.

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After eating we headed off to find the tower, before discovering that my sense of direction was 180 degrees out of whack and we were going the wrong way. We realised this as we arrived at the River Arno, 10 minutes in the wrong direction. The good thing about walking around these ancient towns is no walking is wasted, every narrow, cobbled street is unique to my day to day existence. I felt like I can walk here forever and there will always be something new to see.

I never really recovered my sense of direction after that early blow. However, we did get back on track and eventually hit upon the right path, following a noisy group of ‘jocks’ that really didn’t lift my feelings about Americans overseas, though, admittedly they had better map reading skills than me. We’d just passed the ‘jocks’ along a fairly typical Pisan narrow, gully-like street when we popped out into a square and ‘boom’ there it was, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, gloriously lit and looming imperiously above the buildings surrounding the square. It was a proper OMFG moment. I was unexpectedly and massively excited to see it. It’s magnificent, but not as tall as I expected.

It was only a couple of minutes more to the area around the cathedral and tower. Surprisingly, there were hardly any other people there and we got to wander about and take photos pretty much as we pleased.

We went for a walk around the old town, not getting too misplaced too often now I knew my usually reliable sense of direction wasn’t working. I really like it here, it has a decent vibe and I’m loving the old architecture. At night it had the feel of an ex-European old town somewhere in SE Asia, a little bit crumbly, mouldy and close, and there was a slight smell of sulphur and drain to add to the illusion of being somewhere ancient and barely discovered. I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow when we can explore in the daylight.