You are here: Italy 2016 blog --> May 9

Previously: May 8: Last day in Firenze

May 9: Firenze

Forgot to mention earlier that Hotel Lorena is a really good choice if you don’t mind a bit of noise. It’s directly across the street from the municipal trash “cisterns” -- large trash bins sunken a good 5 feet into the ground, so only a small trashcan-sized superstructure is visible. These are emptied up to three times daily because there are many restaurants on the streets surrounding the hotel that use them to dispose of large quantities of wine bottles and other tourist trash. It’s a remarkably clever system for making use of limited space. Here’s what it looks like:

With the windows and shutters closed for the night, our room is quiet enough that I’ve had no trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. Most importantly, the hotel is about a 10-minute walk from the train and bus station in one direction and from several of the main tourist attractions (the Duomo, Baptistry, Campanile Ponte Vecchio, and Palazza Pitti). So you can’t beat it for convenience.

Today was our last tourist day before heading home. We started out by heading to the bus station to be sure we’d know where we we needed to go tomorrow to catch the airport bus, and to get tickets in advance so we wouldn’t have to worry about them tomorrow. Found the station and bus stop with no problem, and got that out of the way. We also hit a bank machine (“bancomat”) to take out enogh cash to pay our hotel bill; Hotel Lorena only takes cash. We’ve been doing our best to be good guests and I’ve beens speaking to the staff in Italian to the limit of my abilities, and apparently they liked us; they threw in our breakfasts for free, which otherwise would have cost us 40 euros (about $60 Canadian).

The actual tourism part started with a saunter over to the Duomo, which is worth a look if there isn’t much of a line -- and there wasn’t. It’s something like the sixth-biggest church in Europe, and is designed around the usual “awe-inspiring open space” concept, combined with “dome showing how nice heaven is and how nasty hell is” to motivate good behavior. So it has the expected soaring columns, and one of the most impressive domes in the world. (We planned to climb the dome later in the day, when the waiting lines declined from “are you kidding me?” to merely annoying levels.) Here’s a shot from floor level:

Also, I couldn’t resist mocking one of the statue poses, which is captioned “Bitch, please: I’m fabulous” in iPhoto. You be the judge:

Unfortunately, much of the cathedral is roped off, so you can't get to certain key positions where you could take really good photos. As a result, we had to wait until the afternoon, when the lines for climbing the dome woul decline and we'd have a chance to climb high enough into the dome to have a chance for better pictures. For lunch, we grabbed a spicy sausage pizza, and ate it in the piazza just in front of our hotel, washed down with a shared pint of that really good Peroni Rosso beer. (Since we’re not sure whether alcohol can be consumed legally in public if you’re not in a restaurant's terrace, we poured it into my water bottle first and drank it from that bottle instead. Scofflaws'r'us! The pizza was excellent (sourdough multigrain bread!), as was the beer. As we ate, we watched pigeons bathing in the drip from a public fountain, and I fed the sparrows a few bits of bread. (I love sparrows, which are very much unpretentious working-class birds like me, but don’t much care either way about pigeons.)

After lunch, back upstairs to the hotel for a nap and to give the lines to the Duomo’s dome a chance to go down. (The lines are hard to predict, but tend to get smaller later in the day as the tourists burn out and start heading for the pubs.) Sure enough, by 3 PM, the line was quite tolerable -- about a 30- to 40-minute wait in total, and since we were behind a young couple with a cute toddler, we had live entertainment. While we waited, we shared a pistacchio gelato cone and watched the passegiata. Probably our last chance for real gelato before we head home.

The climb to the Duomo’s dome is 463 steps long. Not so bad after our week of mountain climbing, particularly since it was a relatively cool day. The steps are small and wind tightly around until you get to the observation decks that ring the dome. Mostly I didn't have to hunch over to avoid whacking my head, but there were a few tight passes -- not for the claustrophobic. Unfortunately, once you get to the viewing levels, there are 7- to 8-foot tall barriers of yellowed plexiglass or some similar material that block your view down to the cathedral floor, so we have no pictures of the floor from above. They also make it difficult to get good pictures of the inside of the dome, since your angle is severely limited.

Despite the obstacles, we managed a few good shots. For example, here’s a typical crowd scene in heaven, trompe l’oeuil of what appears to be workers dangling their legs from the dome below the skylight, and a cherub holding up the skylight:

From the roof of the dome, you get views even better than those from the Campanile, since you’re higher up. Amusingly, there are only minimal barriers on the roof. The notion is apparently that it doesn’t matter if you throw yourself or a backpack full of rocks off the roof, but heaven forbid you should do that inside the cathedral. The view is often beautiful, but vertiginous:

Stopped for a beer (me) and prosecco (Shoshanna) on the way home, then came back to do preliminary packing before tomorrow, when we’ll have to leave by 7:30 to catch an 8:00 bus to the airport for our flight home.

Dinner report shortly.

©2004–2024 Geoffrey Hart. All rights reserved.