Day 8

Buongiorno,

Our morning started in Verona, packing our bags and packing the car. We checked TripAdvisor and found a decent looking café a short drive away. We knew there were good places to eat in the Old Town, but couldn’t be bothered with the palava of driving into town, finding a parking building, walking to a restaurant, etc.

The café was lovely, just a local neighborhood café where the locals go for breakfast. They helped make a dairy free sandwich for Grandma, and made a good coffee for Koro.

While we were eating breakfast we were studying TripAdvisor and Google Maps to find a place to stay in Firenze. (The English name is Florence, but we far prefer the Italian name.) Basically we were looking for five star luxury for NZD$100 per night or less. We found a place that looked OK, the reviews all said it was very clean and in a good location.

Then we just had to find somewhere to park the car, and we found a parking garage that looked like it was on the outskirts of the Old town of Florence. The parking was €25 per night, which is actually pretty reasonable.

So off we drove to Firenze.

The notion of a speed “limit” in Italy has a very different interpretation to what we are used to in over-policed New Zealand. It isn’t so much a limit as a suggestion. As a rough guide, add 20 to the posted limit and that is the speed you will have to do just to keep up with the rest of the traffic. Even then you will still be getting passed by Mario Andretti and Simona de Silvestro.

When driving on the Autostrada, the rule is you stay in the right hand lane (the slow lane) unless you are passing. You do not sit in the fast lane and hog it. It is illegal to pass on the inside lane (as it is in New Zealand, but we do it anyway). The speedsters actually stick to these rules. If a faster car comes up behind a slow car in the fast lane, the faster car will aggressively tailgate the slow car like nothing you ever see in New Zealand. They get so close you can’t even see their headlights or bonnets in the mirror, all you see is the driver as if he is sitting in your back seat. It works though, the slow cars get the message and move into the slow lane.

Then when you get to the cities, it is the scooters that rule the roads. They are like a hoard of buzzing bees that pass you on both sides at crazy speeds, weaving in and out of the cars, the riders all convinced they could win the Moto GP, their girlfriends blithely hanging on with one arm and txting with the other.

As it happened, our parking garage was right in the middle of Firenze. We navigated down all sorts of twisty lanes, scooters impatiently passing, tourists walking down the middle of the roads, delivery vans tail gating us. Grandma did an amazing job of navigating us to the right place, because it can be hard to see the road names, and the streets are often one way only.

We handed our car over to the parking garage people, who were very helpful, and got a shock when we looked down the street, and there was the Duomo just there, at the end of the street. We’d driven right into the middle of Firenze!

It was a 450 metre walk to our hotel and we had to walk past the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo). There were crowds of tourists everywhere and the sun was shining.

No picture we have ever seen does justice to the Duomo. It is so huge. And yet, when you get close and stand next to it, you see that every square of marble is an exquisite masterpiece in its own right. You can sit by the Duomo all day and never get tired of looking at it.

Our hotel turned out to be just around the corner from the Duomo. Which surprised us, given how reasonably priced that it was. The hotel is on the second floor of a building that was built in around the year 1500.

We had a choice of rooms, and chose a huge room over looking the street. We could open the windows and listen to the hum of Firenze street life.

Lunch was the first item to take care of. We wandered down to Piazza del Signoria and looked at Palazzo Vecchio while we ate our pasta and salad.

We did a lot the last time we were in Firenze, but there was still stuff we hadn’t seen. We had not been to the Basilica del Santa Croce, which is the resting place for some great people - Michelangelo, Dante and Galileo.

We thought we had seen enough of cathedrals after our last

adventure in Europe. But when we walked into this one Grandma said “wow, you forget how beautiful these places are”. As always, it was huge, and it was beautiful inside. We had a good wander around inside. This basilica is where a lot of very precious artworks from the Medici collection are held. In 1966 the river Arno breached it banks and flooded the basilica. At lot of the artworks were damaged by the floodwaters, and it took decades to restore them.

We found Michelangelo’s tomb. Part of it was undergoing restoration, including to repair damage from the flood of 1966. There were four ladies working on this huge painting. They were using tiny paint brushes and were wearing magnifying glasses to see what they were doing. It looked like they had carefully restored every brush stroke on the original painting. It has taken years of work to restore this masterpiece, and it is scheduled to be finished at the end of next month (October 2018). The painting is by Vasari.

Right next to this work was Michelangelo’s tomb - where his body rests. On top of his sarcophagus are three sculptures representing (from left to right) painting, sculpture and architecture, the three arts who mourn the death of the great master. Oh, it just happened to be Vasari who designed the tomb.

Next to Michelangelo’s tomb was a tomb for Dante Aligherio, although his actual body rests elsewhere (I think) after he was exiled from Firenze. The victim of yet another feud between the Medici and various popes.

On the opposite side of the bascilica was the tomb of the great Galileo Galilei. He is mourned by geometry and astronomy.

As we wandered the streets of Firenze, the magic of the place quickly came back to us. In Verona we were worried that it was all the same old stuff we’d seen before. But, Firenze has a magic about it that we just can’t describe. There really is no other city like it that we have visited. Firenze may not work for other people, but it works for Grandma and Koro, and we know it works for Uncle Tony as well.

Koro found a little stationery shop that he poked about in for a half hour or so while Grandma had a sleep. Leather bound books with handmade paper, exquisitely designed pens (fountain and ball point), just amazing craftsmanship.

Next door was an art supply shop that Miya would never have left. It was stacked, literally to the ceiling, with every type of paint, pastel, oil, pencil and brush you can imagine. Sculpting tools, painting knives, canvases, clays, everything a budding Leonardo or Botticelli could wish for.

We had a beautiful meal at our favourite restaurant, Il Caminetto Risorante, recommended by Uncle Tony. We sat at the end of their little terrace, and when we looked up we could see the Duomo peeking around the corner at us.

If there is one city you have to visit in Italy, it is Firenze.

Grandma is telling Koro that today’s story has gone for long enough, time to end it and carry

on with tomorrow’s story.

Love to you all from Grandma & Koro & Firenze Bee. XXX OOO.