Italy Trip Diary, Part 2

Added 18 November 2008. Pictures and stories from our trip to Italy, from November 1 to 14.

Climbing up to see Florence (continued)

Barack Obama Then we went back to the hotel to watch news of the US election, but on Europe time, there's really no news yet... Not even any exit polls.

The next morning, I waited a little impatiently for Jean to wake up, so I could turn on the TV and find out what happened. And what happened was, Barack Obama was making his victory speech! Live! Nice start to the day, which also dawned very sunny and warm.

Then, after a few errands at the train station and such, we start our climbing. Back at the Duomo, we stand in the short line to climb up to the Dome of the church. It's 467 steps, we are informed—no elevator! As it's a tower, some of the steps are also pretty twisty and claustrophobic.

But, it is very cool to see the Dome up close. It's a painted ceiling—the Italians are very fond of painted ceilings. There are hellish scenes near the outer edges, and things get more heavenly as one proceeds toward the center.

View of the dome from the ground

Close-up view after climbing many steps

Further up some more steps, one then ends up outside for a nice view of Florence.

Me blocking the nice view of Florence

After lunch, we visited the Uffizi, one of the more renowned art galleries in Florence. It also turned out to be the place we'd seen the day before with all the statues outside!

The Uffizi contains a fair number of famous works, such as Boticelli's Venus (left—not our picture). It's also a fairly impressive building in itself. For some reason, though, we didn't warm up to this gallery that much. Maybe it was the less-stellar audioguide, which is by room only, making it hard to know what was even being discussed. Maybe it was the seatless toilet seats. Maybe the extra charge for a special exhibit we were not that interested in. At any rate, although it got better at the end with the Rembrandts, it was far from our favourite gallery.

It was still nice and there was still daylight, though, so we decided to go across the bridge over the River Arno (as an aside, we were listening to Room with a View on the Ipod on this trip, and the view in question was that of the River Arno in Florence), headed up yet more stairs—these ones outside and much wider, though—and got to a church from which you get a really nice view of Florence and nearby Tuscanny. (The church itself was worth a boo also, with its big pipe organ.)

Steps to the church with a view

View of Florence and the River Arno from the church near St. Michael's Square

Where the church area wasn't crowded at all, a nearby square was crawling with tourists and locals, but it was also a good place for a view.

The large church in the background is the Duomo

We refreshed ourselves with some gelato and coffee before ambling back to our hotel. Dinner that night was at a more "basic" little restaurant, but one that also had good, substantial food. I started with soup, Jean with ravioli, then he had another type of beef (the osso bucco having sold out at lunch) while I had roast pork with side salad. Though a perfectly fine meal, we were both (yes, Jean too) feeling that two days in a row of red meat was one too many.

Florence/Tuscanny Day 3

The next day was to be our Siena/San Gimignano all-day bus tour. The day before we had scoped out where the tour pass said we were to meet for the tour, and we had double-checked that with the hotel manager. So we found it very odd to be practically the only people waiting for the bus in that location. Surely they wouldn't run a tour for just two?

There was a tour information booth nearby, but it wasn't occupied, and a sign on it advised checking in with the general bus information. We did, and were told we waiting at the right place. But our departure time came and went, and still no sign of a tour bus.

Finally we called the number on our information sheet (at a pay phone—my cell phone doesn't work in Italy), only to be told that we were waiting at the wrong place, and the bus had already left.

The previously unoccupied tour information booth now had an agent, who we went to see. She explained that she had faxed a sheet to our hotel saying we had to meet elsewhere, and earlier, than what was stated in the information we had. Only they'd sent it to the original hotel (before our upgrade) and somehow it had never made its way to our Waldorf Room. We were also told that the Chianti tour with dinner, that we were signed up for the next day, was also likely to be cancelled due to an insufficient number of participants.

All quite annoying. But after some discussion with the agent, we signed up for a Chianti tour without dinner that was that afternoon (and given a 10% discount on that for our troubles), and were told that we could go on the Siena/San Gimignano tour the following day.

The new Chianti tour didn't leave until 2:00, so we had to figure out what to do with ourselves in Florence. Reading through the guidebook, we hit on the Pitti Palace as sounding like an interesting place to visit. (The usual recommendation for another museum was the Accademia, which features Michelangelo's David status. But while that statue certainly seemed worth seeing, it was fairly expensive to get in, and it didn't seem there was a whole lot else to see there besides that one statue.)

So off to the Pitti Palace it was, on another nice sunny day. This proved to be a very large, impressive building, with painted ceilings and other ornate aspects. It housed five museums, of which we saw tw0, the first being the Galleria Palatina. We enjoyed it more than the Uffizi, even though it featured many of the same artists, but probably with lesser-known works. But they also seemed more dynamic, or something. Perhaps it was more of a focus on the later rather than earlier renaissance era.

The other museum we visited within the Palace was the Galleria D'Arte Moderna. "Moderna" in this case did not mean abstract Picassos and such, but just latter-day Italian artists, most of which were still painting very recognizable subjects. You could see pointillism and expressionism coming into the styles; it was a really good collection.

We would have liked to have visited the outdoor Boboli Gardens as well, as they're supposed to be quite something, but we were getting concerned about time. We weren't about to miss another tour!

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Bus touring through Tuscany

We were in plenty of time, and at the right place, for our Chianti tour. On the ride over, the guide gave us a lot of facts about Florence, Tuscanny, Italy, the Chianti area, the wines of the region, olive oil production. As we got stuck in traffic, he commented that traffic logjams were a problem in all Italian cities, with their narrow streets and such. Rome had special problems in trying to add subway lines: whenever they dug anywhere to add them, they made archeological finds that slowed everything down. Florence was in the process of adding a tram line (it currently only had buses). “We need to stop using cars in cities,” he concluded.

Chianti is divided into 12 wine regions, and bottles from each are labelled accordingly. "Chianti Classico" was the area we were going into, the original wine region. They also grew olives there, and he explained about the different qualities and why the best kind is somewhat pricey. The olive industry isn't nearly as well-regulated as wine, though, which makes it tricky sometimes to identify the good oils.

The ride was maybe an hour, and then we went into some very narrow, twisty roads up to the Castello di Querceto winery. There, as the skies clouded over and it started to rain somewhat, we were met by a local guide. He showed us around the grounds, gave some more explanation of the Chianti region and its wine, and brought us into the wine cellar to see some of the ancient (and more recent) stock. It was surprisingly warm in the cellar.

The winery had some extremely old bottles of wine

Next was the wine tasting, which was set up at tables stocked with cheese and plates of bread with salsa and olive oil. We tried three wines: a fairly young red, a more aged red, and a sweet dessert wine made from dried grapes. Though both reds were good, there was no doubt the aging made the second one more interesting. The sweet one was unusual in that it had a bit of a burn on the way down. Not unpleasant, but not what I've experienced with sweet wines before. The olive oil on the bread tasted just astoundingly good.

Accompaniments to our wine tasting

At our table was a British couple and her mother, who was in from South Africa. (And unlike some other tables, ours drank every bit of wine available!) We didn't actually converse much until the British fellow commented that the best sweet wine he'd had was Canadian ice wine, whereupon we piped up. Turns out he worked in the restaurant business, which is how he came to trying ice wine. And some other table wines from Canada. “You know, until I worked there, I had no idea Canada even made wines.”

One type of wine not included in the tasting were the "super Tuscans", made from one type of grape (where other red wines are typically blends). We asked if we could try those (possibly at higher cost) and were told they'd see if they could manage it without having to do so for the whole group. Just one the way out, we were waved over for a taste of one. It was certainly the finest, most complex wine of the day. So we did buy a bottle of that.

Next step was in Greve, a small Chianti town not far. Unfortunately it was still raining, and dark by now, but the stop wasn't all that long anyway. We went into a few stores, concluding with another wine store, before getting back on the bus and heading back to Florence.

In an effort to avoid another red meat meal, we found information (in one of our guidebooks) on a seafood restaurant, and went there for dinner. (Florence never got the rain we encountered in the Chianti area, by the way.) There we had quite the extraordinary meal. We ordered the appetizer sampler to share, not realizing this meant we would get platter after platter of appetizers—smoked tuna, bocconcini with tomatoes, prosciutto, fish on tomato... And our mains were fantastic also, both involving combinations of seafood and pasta.

Happy diner

And for a change, we had a bottle of white wine with everything. To end the meal, we were given complementary glasses of strawberry wine, which was very good. It was one of the more expensive meals we had, but well worth it.

Italy, Part 3