A Place To Read A Book And Write A Letter: Florence

Florence is usually identified as the city of the Renaissance; in fact, it was the city that won back all the English after the Catholic Church scared them off. The imposition of romanticism (whatever that means; I got it from a book) was so strong on Florence that in 1966, when it was flooded with heavy levels of mud (which, in sepia, looks a lot like dark chocolate), the entire world created a committee to fund it's restoration, and international youths descended upon the city to wipe clean all the manuscripts and etchings available.

Naturally, as a program, this could not be passed up. So the entire class took a weekend field trip to Florence, headed by our professor Emilio, a six shooter long ago loaded with art history. What's this Emilio? Bam! Michelangelo! And this? Bam! Brunelleschi! Who - Bam! Donatello! Bam! Audrey Hepburn! Bam! Bam! Bam!

(And yes, Audrey Hepburn did come up, as Emilio compared her merits to Julie Andrews for the good part of a half hour. No surprise, Audrey won.)

The dominating figure in the townscape is the Duomo, flanked by a separate Baptistry. The Dome is advertised to have 463 steps. This time, they are right. The climb to the top is measured in intervals, and at the halfway point tourists are afforded a chance to exit onto the catwalk, right underneath the final judgement frescoes; far away, the Last Judgement looks old and outdated. Up close, however, it literally scared my socks off (I later found my socks on the floor of the cathedral, having dropped six stories down. But here's the kicker: my shoes stayed on my feet the whole time. How in the world does that happen?).

The Baptistry is famous for its golden doors, solid metal doors that, in 1966, were swept away by mud and replaced with imitations, for insurance purposes, I suppose. Less known about the Baptistry is that it was the very chapel in which Dante himself was baptized.

Florence was the city that gave Dante the boot, by the way. His home turf threw him out and told him to, and I quote, "keep the change, you filthy animal" (that's a rough translation of his Inferno). From there he was forced to wander Italy, like the show Kung Fu, except without the use of martial arts. Or anything remotely similar. So it's not like it at all.

There is a Dante museum in Florence, fashioned out of his old house, but it sucks - and rightly so. I would expect nothing more than a large collection of Wikipedia entries, pasted to the walls in an elementary way, from the city which banished him (which, coincidentally, is how the museum goes).

Florence also is the home and shelter of Michelangelo's David, whom everyone has seen in pictures. A picture is of him, though, is not worth moon rocks on Mars. Seeing him in person was an overpowering experience. I like to think that he forced his way into the canon of art by his sheer size.

Our hotel had an English language CNN. I fell asleep bingeing in the news of the world.