Amsterdam and Home

On Sunday, August 26th, we had another nice breakfast in the hotel. The weather forecast was the same as the day before: intermittent showers, high in the 60s. One hundred degrees in Florence was looking better and better.

We went to the Grote Kerk for the 11 a.m. service. There were only about 90 people in the congregation, at the one Sunday service, a communion service, at the most important Protestant church in a (theoretically) mostly Protestant city of 150,000. But it seemed to be a very pleasant, very friendly group of people. When we were greeted at the door, it became clear that we were English-speakers and someone came up to us and welcomed us, very cordially, in English. Several times during the service there were references, in English, to their English-speaking guests (there may have been others).

But what we were really there for was to hear the organ, and hear it we did! Mary Joy loved it: it was silvery and smooth; one could hear every voice. It served the organist well in his hymn-leading and hymn improvisation.

Afterwards, we went to the V&D department store and bought a couple of sandwiches for the flight home on Monday. We brought them back to our room and put them in the refrigerator. Then we went to the train station.

Buying tickets to Amsterdam turned out to be more involved than expected. We tried to get them out of a machine, but the machines didn’t take either cash or American credit cards. So we went to the ticket counter and I mentioned to the woman there that the machine wouldn’t accept my Visa card. “Neither do we,” she said, but unlike the machine, she did take cash. Reading Rick Steves later made it clear that no Dutch train ticket machines take credit cards (or American debit cards), while what else they accept may vary wildly from machine to machine (euro bills only, or euro coins only, or special tokens only). For a relatively civilized country, this seemed strange. We’ve had no trouble buying tickets with our Visa card at any Italian machine, and we did it at the one German machine that we tried, two years ago.

But we caught our “Sprinter” train and twenty minutes later we were at Amsterdam’s Central Station. We were immediately caught up in the crowd heading up the Damrak, the main street going up to Dam Square.

We didn’t have a particular itinerary in mind. Rick Steves had given Mary Joy some ideas on where to eat, and since it was after 1 p.m., that was the first order of business, though we briefly considered getting immediately on one of the canal tour boats docked by the station. Instead, we found ourselves in the horde of people moving south, past the Damrak Sex Museum and the Beurs (Stock Exchange) to Dam Square. This is where the Amstel River was dammed (hence “Amsterdam”) around the year 1250, and a village was built.

We looked into the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), but it didn’t appear to be that interesting, so we didn’t pay the ticket fee to go in. It had a Sunday evening organ concert series, but apparently not that particular evening, assuming that we would.want to stay in Amsterdam that late and come back to the church. Sol we went on, past the Royal Palace (the former City Hall in the time of the Republic, before the Netherlands had a king foisted upon it, following the Napoleonic Wars), and into the pedestrianized (and, as Rick Steves points out, cheesily, crassly commercialized) Kalverstraat.. We made a visit to the “hidden” Catholic church of St. Peter and Paul. After the Reformation, Catholicism was officially outlawed, but unofficially tolerated, as long as it kept a low profile, worshiping in churches that didn’t advertise themselves as such. This church doesn’t look like a church from the outside, but on the inside is a normal, if small, Catholic church, with all the trappings (altars, statues, pews, candles).

Next, we went to the Begijnhof. Beguines were Catholic laywomen, widows or spinsters, who, from 1346 on, lived together in individual townhouses around a courtyard, very much like the almshouses in Haarlem, only bigger, with its own church. The Beguines lived lives of prayer and acts of charity. After the Reformation, they continued, until the 1970s, though their church was taken away and given to English Calvinist refugees, fleeing persecution by the Church of England. The Mayflower Pilgrims worshiped there before leaving for America. It’s still an English Presbyterian church. Meanwhile, the Beguines turned a pair of the houses into a “hidden” Catholic church, and it still is one. The Begijnhof is still housing for single women, mostly Catholic.

Now we went looking for lunch. It took us a while—Rick Steves guidebooks have hand-drawn maps--but we finally tracked down Pannekoeken Huis Upstairs. Upstairs, indeed—the stairs were even steeper and narrower than the ones at Die Raeckse! Once we got to the top, there were only a few tables, but on this trip we were very lucky about getting into restaurants without having reservations, and that proved to be true here, too—one couple was just then leaving. We shared a large savory chicken pancake and, for dessert, a pancake with berries and whipped cream. As we were leaving, a rather heavy couple from New York was about to come up. I had been going to take a picture of the staircase, but I didn’t want to do so while they were going up, because a) it would be an invasion of their privacy; b) the stairs were so narrow that all you would see would be their rears; and c) if they fell and landed on me, I probably wouldn’t survive.

Continuing to follow the Rick Steves Amsterdam City Walk, we went through the Bloemenmarkt (Flower Market). While there certainly were flowers there, it might more accurately be described, at least this time of year, as the “Tulip Bulb Market.” A lot of it was dedicated to selling tulip bulbs and other seeds to tourists for use in their home gardens. The only full-grown tulips there (tulips being a spring flower) were wooden ones.

We went down the busy Leidsestraat, finally starting to cross the famous canals of Amsterdam, until we came to the Leidseplein. This is how Rick Steves characterizes it: “Filled with outdoor tables under trees; ringed with cafes, theaters and nightclubs; bustling with tourists, diners, trams, mimes, and fire-eaters; and lit by sun- or lantern-light, Leidseplein is Amsterdam’s liveliest square.” Maybe a little too lively for our tastes. We decided not to stop there, and instead go on to the Vondelpark. But I made a wrong turn (Rick Steves maps!) and eventually we ended up at the Rijksmuseum, instead. This is the greatest art museum in the Netherlands. When my father and I saw it in 1991, it had been largely closed because a special exhibition was being set up, so most of its most famous paintings (by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, etc.) were crammed together in a relatively small space. Mary Joy and I had considered going there, but hadn’t been able to figure out getting tickets in advance, and were now there so late in the day that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to pay the twelve-and-a-half euro entrance fee.

So far, Mary Joy was not impressed with Amsterdam, finding it too crowded with tourists and too commercialized. Steves suggested that Jordaan was a nice neighborhood, and had a tour of it in his book, so we passed by the entrance to the Vondelpark, which is sort of the Central Park of Amsterdam, and didn’t go in. Instead, we crossed the bridge back over the Singelgracht (“gracht” means “canal”) to the Max Euweplein, with its large-scale chessboard (Max Euwe was world chess champion in the mid-twentieth century). To get back to the Leidseplein, you go through a modern-classical colonnade, above which is a Latin inscription which had impressed me with its sage advice when I first saw it twenty-one years before: “HOMO SAPIENS NON URINAT IN VENTUM,” which tells you what a wise man doesn’t do into the wind.

I had liked Amsterdam back then, as had my dad, though he had thought that it was unfortunate that so much of the city was defaced by graffiti. We didn’t notice much graffiti now.

We went through the Leidseplein, again without stopping, and back down the Leidsestraat, turning left at the Prinsengracht. Here is how Amsterdam is laid out: the Amstel River comes in from the southeast. It originally ran into the larger IJ River about where the train station is now, creating a harbor just before the IJ flowed into the Zuider Zee (a large bay leading to the North Sea, but now mostly reclaimed as dry land). As we’ve seen, the Amstel was dammed at Dam Square in the thirteenth century. Since then, the riverbed both north and south of Dam Square has been filled in and turned into streets (Damrak and Rokin). The River itself is now led through canals north on both sides of the old town center, which is now basically an island, with canals like a deep cup surrounding it on three sides, and the harbor, to the north, sitting like a lid on the top of the cup.

During the city’s golden age, during the seventeenth century, it expanded beyond the old town, to the west, creating three new canals to drain the new real estate development: the Herengracht (Lords’ Canal), Keizersgracht (Emperor’s Canal) and Prinsengracht (Prince’s Canal). The Prinsengracht, alongside which we now walked, is very pleasant, with shady banks. Tied alongside these banks are Amsterdam’s answer to a 1930s housing shortage: houseboats. These are mostly old barges that have been turned into living quarters, with plumbing and electricity. Most of them are not exactly beautiful, looking like what they are: beat-up former working barges. There is even a Houseboat Museum, along the Prinsengracht.

We walked along the west bank of the Prinsengracht for about fifteen blocks, crossing a number of side canals and passing across from the Westerkerk, where Rembrandt is buried, and the Anne Frank House. We were now in Jordaan.. Rick Steves says: “Welcome to the quiet Jordaan. Built in the 1600s as a working-class housing area, it’s now home to artists and yuppies.” A very pleasant neighborhood. Mary Joy liked it a lot more than the commercial center, overrun by hordes of tourists (like us). We needed coffee at this point, so we stopped at a recommended café, Café ‘t Smalle, and even though the skies looked threatening, sat at a table by the canal (a side canal running into the Prinsengracht). We ordered slices of apple cake with our coffee, which arrived just before the rain. Our table had an umbrella, but it didn’t cover everything, so Mary Joy got hers out, and we finished our cake and coffee, staying dry.

The rain didn’t last long, so we crossed over the side canal and took a look into the Cheese Museum. There didn’t appear to be anything about Wisconsin cheese in this museum, so, disappointed, we went out and crossed the Prinsengracht to the Anne Frank House.

Everyone knows the story of how Anne Frank and her Jewish family hid in a secret annex behind her father’s office, a story somewhat similar to Corrie ten Boom’s. This was the building, a modern commercial building facing the Prinsengracht. The context is a little disorienting: here is where Anne and the others hid from the Nazis for two years; a block south is the Westerkerk, where Rembrandt is buried, under Amsterdam’s tallest steeple; across the canal is the Cheese Museum. The line to enter the Anne Frank House stretched out in front of the building, so we didn’t try. Instead, we followed the Rick Steves “Jordaan Walk” backwards, along the Leliegracht canal, toward the center of town.

It started to rain very heavily. My umbrella, having been turned inside-out several times, had some holes in it, so I was getting wet. Along the Leliegracht we stopped several times under cover of awnings or roof overhangs, to wait for the rain to let up a little, but it didn’t. One of the places we stopped, I think, was a “coffeshop.” In Amsterdam, a “coffeeshop” is not a place where you get a coffee. It is, instead, a place where marijuana is sold and consumed, legally. However, a recent law will, in a few months, ban sales to foreigners. Several times on our visit to Amsterdam I smelled something that brought back memories of younger days (though, like Bill Clinton, I had never inhaled).

Eventually, before we got back to the center of town, the rain pretty much ended. We went looking for an early dinner and ended up at Kantjil en de Tijger, an Indonesian restaurant behind the Begijnhof. We weren’t hungry enough for a full-scale rijsttafel (“rice table”), a multicourse meal, so instead we each had a single large bowl containing rice, meat and vegetables.

Now we went back down to the boat docks by the Central Station, to see if we could get one of the recommended canal tours. We had less than twenty minutes to wait for a 100 Highlights Cruise with Holland International. We got window seats in the low boat, designed to pass under the bridges. The hour-long tour took us first out into the harbor, which we hadn’t before seen, then into the canal system—we cruised along the Prinsengracht a lot faster than we had walked the same route. The pre-recorded description was in Dutch, German, English and Spanish (not French, for some reason). It was interesting to compare and contrast the versions in the different languages—not always exactly the same. The tour was interesting and relaxing and we were glad we took it.

We caught a train back to Haarlem. Walking back to the hotel, Mary Joy expressed a hunger for some fries—the ones she’d had in the market the day before had been very good. On a Sunday night, there wasn’t much open other than pizza places and bars. We might have gotten fries in the latter, but that wasn’t clear, and I was tired, so we went back to Die Raeckse and finished packing.

The next day, everything went smoothly. We took the train to Sloterdijk, changed to the airport train and arrived in plenty of time to catch our flight to Reykjavik. We ate our Haarlem sandwiches on the plane and, when we got in, had something at one of the airport cafeterias. Our stay at Keflavik Airport was much shorter than on the way over, only about an hour-and-a-half. On the plane to MSP with us were a group of older people, as well as a pair of young men (one of them wearing a horned Viking helmet) who had been representing Iowa pork producers at some Icelandic event.

No skyr on either flight. We got into the Humphrey Terminal around 6 p.m., got quickly through immigration and customs, and called our friend Mary Kay, who picked us up and got us home.

All in all, a good trip. In the future, we’ll aim for less traveling around. Mary Joy said that she was afraid that I’d end up with a heart attack, moving our heavy bags around. I really didn't have any trouble, though: neither was more than about 30 pounds.

Next? We haven’t decided where our autumn trip will be, but we’ll have to make up our minds soon. Next summer? Probably Spain.

Haarlem

On Saturday, August 25^th, we went down to the breakfast buffet at our hotel. There were breads, fruit, sliced ham and cheese—very good.

Then we went to the Saturday food market in the square by the Grote Kerk. This was not quite like the farmers’ markets at home. While there was some locally grown produce, there were also oranges (the Netherlands may have the House of Orange reigning there, but they have no orchards of orange growing there), squeezed into juice as we watched. There were stands selling cheeses, stands selling sausages, stands selling french fries (with your choice of ketchup or mayonnaise), even stands selling herring to eat raw. Eating raw herring is not something you see done in Minnesota, at least not in public. I didn’t actually see anyone do this there in the market in Haarlem—I thought it would be impolite to stop and stare. But I have it on good authority that this feat is actually done, and not by dolphins or trained seals.

We walked to the Tourist Information office and asked the man there for some ideas as to what to do in Haarlem, especially relating to music, organ music in particular. As we already knew, there was a series of concerts on the great organ of the Grote Kerk on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Unfortunately, we were there only on a Saturday and Sunday. That afternoon there would be a concert with a wind ensemble, and that evening there would be a vespers service, but the only organ involved would be the small choir organ. He didn’t know if the main organ would be used at the 11 a.m. Sunday church service and couldn’t reach anyone at the church, by phone, to find out. But there would be a concert that afternoon at 3:00 at the Catholic Cathedral.

He gave us a couple of self-guided walking tour brochures, one for city monuments and the other for the almshouses: courtyards surrounded by small townhouses, built over the centuries by charitable wealthy people in order to house widows or other worthy poor people. They are now nice, privately-owned homes. He circled on a map those almshouses that would be open today. None of these courtyards would be open to the public on Sunday, so we would have to see them today.

Haarlem is a pleasant, prosperous-looking town. Originally, it was across a large lake, the Haarlemmer Meer, from Amsterdam, but that was filled in long ago. In the seventeenth century, when the Dutch had a colony in America, while the capital was Nieuw Amsterdam, at the southern end of Manhattan Island, there was also a village named after Haarlem, at the northern end.

Included with our tourist information was a voucher for free coffee or tea at the La Place restaurant on the top floors of the V&D department store, right across the street from the Tourist Information office. We decided to use it before setting out on our self-guided tour. Rick Steves mentions La Place as the place to get the best view out over Haarlem. We had our coffee and a pastry on the top floor, looking over to the Grote Kerk, which was like a big ship floating on a sea of rooftops.

We went back to the market square by the Grote Kerk, to start our almshouse walking tour, but while we were passing the church, we heard what sounded like organ music coming from inside. Perhaps someone was practicing! We were going to visit the Grote Kerk anyway at some point, so we might as well do so when we could hear some music.

There are two entrances to the church: on the south side of the nave is the entrance for people attending church services. On the north side, running through the gift shop, is the tourist entrance. In the shop, we bought our tickets, and a few gifts, and asked about the music we had heard (not, it turned out, the organ, but, rather the wind ensemble, practicing for that afternoon’s concert) and whether the great organ would be played at the Sunday service (yes).

So we entered the medieval gothic Cathedral of St. Bavo. Since the reformers didn’t believe in the veneration of saints, after the Reformation the newly Protestant churches in the Netherlands tended to be given purely utilitarian names, such as "Old Church," "New Church," "East Church," "West Church" or "Great Church." But apparently people still called this church "St. Bavo," because now signs, posters, etc., all call it the "Great Church or St. Bavo." This was not the only ambivalence shown about the church’s pre-Reformation history. The reformers had destroyed the church’s statues and whitewashed its walls. Recently some of that whitewash had been taken off, to show some of the brightly colorful decoration.

As we entered, a large wind ensemble was indeed practicing in the choir, surrounded by the carved wooden stalls. This provided a pleasant background as we walked around, following the detailed tour in the Rick Steves book. Towering over the rear of the church was the great 18^th-century organ—not, unfortunately, being played.

When we left, the idea was to look at some of the almshouses, however, the weather forecast for our two days in Holland had been simple: rain. It wasn’t a constant rain, but rather an all-day on-and-off scattering of showers, mostly brief and light, but occasionally intense. I had brought along an umbrella, but all Mary Joy had was a hooded windbreaker. Seeing an umbrella stand full of umbrellas for sale in front of a gift shop, she went in and came out carrying a red and blue umbrella with a picture of tulips and "HOLLAND" in big letters. The shop owner had also suggested strongly that we visit the Corrie ten Boom House. There would be an hour-long tour there at 1:30.

During the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, the devoutly religious Corrie ten Boom and her father and sister hid Jews and resistance fighters behind a fake wall in her bedroom. They were betrayed to the Gestapo and arrested, and only Corrie survived the resulting imprisonment. After the war, she wrote a book about her experiences, The Hiding Place, which was turned into a movie. I had heard of her, but didn’t know much about her.

We decided to visit the house (open only by hour-long tour), which would mean first eating a quick lunch in the market. We bought some "English pies": small pot pies that you can hold in your hand while eating. I had a Thai chicken curry pie; I forget what Mary Joy had. We also got some fresh-squeezed orange juice.

Then we went to the Corrie ten Boom House, but it turned out that the 1:30 tour was Dutch-language. There was an American family there (father, mother and two or three young kids), patiently waiting for the two o’clock English language tour, even as the 1:30 group went inside. But we couldn’t wait, without missing the organ concert at the Catholic cathedral.

Instead, we continued our almshouse tour, eventually working our way toward the cathedral, which was across the canal from the Old Town, to the southwest. On the way, we stopped in at the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), the first church in Haarlem to be built as a Protestant church, in 1645. There were people there answering questions about the church and, in Mary Joy’s case, about the organ, on which someone was now practicing. It is a not very large baroque organ, which had been the organ in the Grote Kerk before the current one was installed in 1738. But we didn’t have a lot of time to stay and listen.

The Cathedral of St. Bavo is a large, romanesque church, with two tall towers and an even taller dome, built between 1895 and 1935. Apparently, the Catholics decided that if the Protestants were so ambivalent about naming their Grote Kerk after Saint Bavo, the name was fair game to be reclaimed by its previous owners.

The organ concert, by Hayo Boerema, from Rotterdam, was terrific. I forget what the first piece was. The second was a wonderful improvisation. The last piece was the Organ Symphony Number 6 of Louis Vierne—very difficult, but Mary Joy was impressed with how well he played it.

Afterwards, dodging rainshowers, we finished tracking down almshouses on the map. The almshouses are varied enough and pleasant enough, with their garden courtyards, to be interesting.

We went back to the cathedral for the 7 p.m. mass. We arrived about ten minutes beforehand, but the doors weren’t open yet and only a handful of people were gathered there. Eventually, the priest showed up and opened the doors. People were joking with him about (apparently) how late he was. We all went into the choir, and after a few minutes for the priest to vest himself, mass began. Including us, there were only twenty-three people in the congregation, mostly over the age of seventy. This was one of only two weekend masses at the largest Catholic church in a city of 150,000 people. The other mass would be the 11 a.m. Sunday high mass, presumably presided over by the bishop, so no doubt there would be many more people there, but still, it was clear that the Netherlands wasn’t exactly the same as Mexico or Poland as far as religious fervor was concerned.

For dinner, we went to one of the recommendations in the Rick Steves guide, Jacobus Pieck Eetlokaal. This is a small, cozy, family friendly place: there was a family group, including very young children, at a nearby table. The food, beer and venue weren’t as artsy as at the Jopen Kerk, but they were good enough, and good value.

Still Writing

I still have to make two posts for this trip, covering our two days in Haarlem and Amsterdam, but I haven't had much time to write since getting back home. I'm a slow writer in the best of circumstances, so I am slogging my way through, a paragraph at a time. Haarlem should be posted in a day or two. Amsterdam will take a little longer.

A Travel Day, Ending With Beer in a Church

On Friday, August 24th, we had breakfast, a nice buffet, in the courtyard of the Hotel Siena, then went up to sit for a while on the balcony of our room. Then we went down to check out. I hadn’t been able to empty the air out of our cushions, so we left them.

This was one of the two train trips for which I had gotten tickets in advance, online, before leaving home: nine euros apiece for the fast train to Venice. The efficient thing to do would be to get off the train in Mestre, and there catch the bus to Treviso Airport, instead of going all the way to Venice, walking across the bridge from Santa Lucia Station to Piazzale Roma, and catching the same bus at its starting point. But while getting off at Mestre would cut forty minutes off our travel time, all that extra time, and substantially more, would be spent waiting at the Mestre railroad station, while if we went on to Venice, there would be less waiting around and what there was would be in Venice. Granted, we wouldn’t have time to do anything except sit in Piazzale Roma, but we would still have a glimpse of the Grand Canal, and the idea of waiting for a lengthy period anywhere, much less at the Mestre station, did not appeal to Mary Joy at all. Mestre, straight across the bridge on the mainland, is technically a part of the municipality of Venice. But it is about as un-Venice as a place can be: a large, gritty industrial port city, to which most former Venetians have migrated, in search of jobs and cheaper rents.

So once again I bought bus tickets at the ATVO shop on Piazzale Roma, while Mary Joy sat in the small, shady park, watching our bags. We caught our bus, and after a forty-minute ride we were at Treviso’s tiny airport. The principal airline flying in and out of there is Ryanair, the quintessential budget airline, whose CEO had speculated about charging to use the planes’ toilets. But given how planes are built, that had proven to be impossible. We have flown Ryanair several times, but on this day we would be flying Transavia, another budget airline, headquartered in the Netherlands.

We arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. In fact, with more time than we had expected, since our plane was late arriving, and we ended up leaving about an hour-and-a-half late.

When we finally got to the point of waiting in line at the gate, I made an interesting observation. Most women in Italy, in this very hot weather (which was supposed to break the day after we left), wore sandals or open-toed shoes, and most of these women had painted their toenails. Most of the women waiting in this line to fly to Amsterdam also wore sandals, but only a few of them had painted toenails. Was this due to a Calvinist disdain for worldly show? More likely, the climate in the Netherlands was such that women there didn’t have much opportunity to display their toes. I refrained from mentioning this observation to Mary Joy, who was already pining for sunny Italy, even though we hadn’t yet left it.

Interestingly, the plane itself, when it arrived, was a big sky-blue and white KLM plane (instead of Transavia’s green, blue and white), with a little plate near the door that said: “Operated by Transavia Airlines.” When we got to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, it was treated as a KLM flight on the baggage carrousel notice.

The flight itself was uneventful, though our luggage ended up being nearly the last off the plane. The big train station is right next to the terminal. Rather than try to sort out our route on one of the ticket machines, I decided to go to the ticket counter, even though electronic signs there kept warning us that it would cost half a euro more than the machine. We got our tickets to Haarlem, including return tickets for the following Monday, and a suggested itinerary--we were actually able to do better than that suggestion by catching a train that was just about to leave for Amsterdam Central Station.

But we weren’t going all the way downtown. Instead, after a few minutes we would change trains at Amsterdam Sloterdijk station, and a few stations later we would get off at Haarlem. Haarlem is a city of 150,000 or so inhabitants, twenty minutes by train west of Amsterdam. Not far beyond is the beach resort of Zandvoort, on the North Sea. There is one principal reason why an organist like Mary Joy would want to stay in Haarlem rather than in Amsterdam: one of the world’s great organs, the 1738 Christian Muller organ in the Grote Kerk (Great Church). Mozart played on it when he was ten years old. In addition, Haarlem is recommended by Rick Steves (himself a pianist) in his Amsterdam guide as a home-base alternative “giving you small-town warmth overnight, with easy access (twenty minutes by train) to wild-and-crazy Amsterdam during the day.”

So we arrived in Haarlem a little after eight in the evening and walked to the Hotel Die Raekse and checked in. Since we were substantially later than expected, they had just charged our Visa card for our three-night stay (I had sent them the card number when I reserved the room). Steves says that it’s a family-run hotel, and, indeed, we saw the same two people (presumably husband and wife) there all the time.

Steves had warned that restaurant hours in the Netherlands were more like those in the U.S. than in Italy or Spain, so we were worried that we might not find a place to eat at this hour. However, our hosts reassured us that there were several restaurants open now, just down the street: one Japanese, one Italian and one Dutch.

There is no elevator in the hotel and the number one negative that people complained about on Tripadvisor was how steep the stairs were. They were right. These stairs were much steeper and narrower than the stairs to the choir loft in Mary Joy’s church at home. They almost reminded me of stairs in a medieval castle. Going up them, carrying my roll-on bag while wearing Mary Joy’s big backpack, I almost fell over backwards. But once we got upstairs, our room was large and pleasant.

Once settled, we hurried back down and outside, going a few blocks until we found a square, with restaurants on three sides: a Japanese restaurant, a pizza place, and something called Jopen Kerk. That was a brewpub, with a bar downstairs and a restaurant upstairs, all of it surrounded by big brewing vats. Apparently, Jopen is a company that has been brewing artisan beers locally in Haarlem since the ‘90s, and they had taken over an old church, the Jacobuskerk, put in new stained glass and a décor based on the color red, and called it "Jopen Kerk."

We pleaded ignorance of the language (the menu was entirely in Dutch) and were helped out by two of the waitresses. I ordered fish (plaice?) along with the suggested beer, a lager. Mary Joy had a lamb stew, along with a heavier, darker brew, called Koyt. According to their website, this is made with herbs instead of hops. It had a smoky, chocolatey taste, not quite like any beer I’ve ever tasted. We both liked it very much.

Then we returned to our hotel and went to bed..

Verona

On Thursday, August 23rd we had our breakfast, such as it was, and went out to make a quick visit to the former Dominican monastery of San Marco, now a museum, before catching our train. The evening before, I had done a quick check of train schedules on the Deutsche Bahn (German Railway) website, which is my general go-to site for European train schedules. If I had wanted to buy the tickets online, I’d have gone to the Trenitalia site, but since I didn’t have a printer available, that wouldn’t have been possible. But in any event, DB ended up not finding our best itinerary, so I might have been better off with Trenitalia anyway, though it isn’t as easy to use as Deutsche Bahn.

Getting from Florence to Verona is a little complicated. There is a highspeed train, but it runs not from the main station, Santa Maria Novella, which was near our B&B, but from the Campo di Marte station, which is not. In addition, since we hadn’t booked in advance, the highspeed trains had sold out their cheaper tickets. DB was finding a much longer route, changing in Padua, still somewhat pricey, but not, at least, over fifty euros apiece.

So we went to Santa Maria Novella to buy our tickets, and on the ticket machine I immediately found a route that was shorter and cheaper than through Padua: take the highspeed back to Bologna and take a regional train from there directly to Verona. That meant that we would leave around 10:20 and get in a little after 1 p.m.

Immediately, Mary Joy, she of the fifteen-minute tour of the Chateau de Chillon while waiting for a train in Montreux, resolved not to waste the time before our train would leave, so the next morning we walked the 3½ blocks to San Marco. We had been there the last time we were in Florence. The reason for going there is that in the fifteenth century, one of the friars there was the great painter Fra Angelico, so when they decided to provide the cells where they slept with devotional murals, who did they turn to? You go upstairs to the sleeping quarters and the first thing you see is a wonderful Annunciation. The look of pure surprise on Mary’s face is exactly what one would expect under the circumstances, i.e., having an angel an with multicolored wings suddenly appear to announce that you are going to be the mother of the Messiah. Or at least what one would expect of a calm, devout young woman. I haven’t yet seen an Annunciation where she runs off screaming .

You then go around to look in through the doors of the individual cells. Each has a mural, most showing a scene of the crucifixion of Christ, with a saint of the Dominican Order (St. Dominic, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Peter Martyr) kneeling nearby. The idea, presumably, is that the friar would feel drawn into a devotional state, contemplating the passion and death of Jesus, more easily by doing so alongside a fellow brother or sister of his order, one who had, so to speak, “made it” already.

One who didn’t make it is also memorialized there. Toward the end of the fifteenth century the prior of San Marco was Girolamo Savonarola, who from his cell there led a prophetic, puritanical movement that used a “bonfire of the vanities” to destroy luxury goods, and drove out the ruling Medici family, reinstituting the Florentine Republic. But his prophecies didn’t come true, his alliance with the invading French, against whom the Pope had put together the so-called “Holy League,” got him excommunicated, the Florentines turned against him and he was hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria. In San Marco there is a large bust of Savonarola, along with certain personal items.

We hurried back to our room, collected our luggage, said goodbye to the young woman running the place for Signora Pezzati, and walked over to the station to catch our train.

Along the way to Verona we were shocked to see evidence of the recent earthquake in this area: you would be riding along, looking at normal north Italian scenery, when suddenly there’d be a flattened farmhouse or a village that looked like it had been through an artillery barrage.

We arrived in Verona and walked to our hotel, the Hotel Siena, a pleasant place, a little closer to the railroad station than to the old center of town. Our room even had a small balcony with a table and chairs, overlooking the courtyard where breakfast was served.

We asked the desk clerk for restaurant recommendations, and she gave us a list and map. We went to the closest place, named Tre Risotti (Three Risottos), which looked okay, but was now closed until 7 p.m. We asked for a reservation for dinner for then.

We walked on toward the center, stopping for lunch (sharing a pizza) at the Café del Teatro. Not bad. Then we continued to the large Piazza Bra, with the Roman Arena to the north, the old city wall to the south and a long terrace full of restaurants to the west. We went around the well-preserved Arena to the ticket office, across the street to the north. There we traded in our voucher for tickets to that night’s performance of Puccini’s opera Turandot.

We followed the crowds along the pedestrianized Via Mazzini, to the Piazza delle Erbe, originally the Roman forum and now a large, pleasant square with market stands and, toward the north end, a tall pillar with the winged lion of Venice, to show who was boss from 1404 to 1797.

We then wandered down a nearby street, until we came to a passage leading to a small courtyard packed with people. It was a madhouse. At the far end of the courtyard was a bronze statue of a young woman. People were taking pictures of others rubbing the statue’s right breast, which was worn to a shiny golden gleam. To the right was a building, with a balcony. Every so often a young woman would come out onto the balcony, and her family or friends would take pictures of her. Then she’d go back in and a few minutes later another young woman would come out and repeat the process.

This was, of course, the famous marriage market, where young Veronese women are sold to the highest bidder.

The last line was just to test if you are awake. The building was actually, of course, the House of Juliet, as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and, which happens to be set in Verona. Or, rather, the building is not actually the House of Juliet, since Juliet herself was never actual. That doesn’t prevent there from being a statue of her, which the tourist hordes treat in ways that they would not be allowed to treat a real woman: rubbing her breast is supposed to bring luck in love. Of course, she herself wasn’t exactly lucky in love, but then, she never had a chance to rub her statue’s breast. Though, even if the statue would have existed in her time, she herself wouldn’t have so existed. I suppose if there can be a statue of Peter Pan in London, and statues of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox on the lakefront in Bemidji, Minnesota, why can’t there be a statue of Juliet Capulet in Verona?

We then went to the Duomo, but didn’t go inside. Next, we walked a few blocks to the Ponte di Piedra (Stone Bridge) and crossed to the other side of the Adige River. As we crossed, Mary Joy noticed a suitcase floating down the river. On the other side was the very old church of San Stefano, originally Verona’s cathedral. It has an odd nave, which, halfway down, goes down a flight of steps, so that people in the back of the church are on a lower level and have to look up to see the altar. There are some old medieval and renaissance murals, not generally in good shape.

We crossed back over. The suitcase was gone, on its way to the Po and the Adriatic. At this point, we were looking for a coffee, and decided to get it at a bar that was advertising a riverview terrace. It was pleasant and shady, though there was not much river view, because the terrace was surrounded by a wall. You could see the renaissance-era Castel San Pietro with its square towers up the hill on the other side of the river.

At the next table was a couple from Ontario, who were there to go on a biking tour, to Venice and beyond.

We walked back to the Piazza delle Erbe and then to the Arena. At a stall there we looked for seat cushions. We ended up buying, for seven euros, two little seat-sized plastic air mattresses. The idea was that after the opera we could deflate them, fold them up and take them home.

We went back to our room and got ready, then, at seven, went to Tre Risotti for dinner. We were the only customers there and had the whole dining room to ourselves for at least half an hour, until another couple came in. Seven o’clock is very early for Italians to eat dinner. In another room, perhaps the kitchen, pop music was blaring on the radio. Our meal (again, I don’t remember exactly what we had) was good but not great.

We walked, with our cushions, one pink and one black, to the Arena. It was nearly 8:30 and the restaurant terraces in Piazza Bra were filled with diners. People were filing into the various gates of the Arena. Where you went in, as in ancient Roman times, as also for modern football stadiums, depended on where your seats were. Our tickets were in the first-come-first-served cheap seats, section D. This is simply a matter of going into one of the three gates indicated for Section D (we went in Gate 6), and up the stairs, which come out at the top level. Then you find the best available open spots (no seat numbers or delimiting markings) on the unbacked stone seats. We weren’t in the cheapest seats—E and F were on the sides and cost a euro or two less, while C and D were facing the stage, though, as I realized when we took our places somewhat to the right of center, a long way from it. Someone had written that it wasn’t any farther than the highest seats at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but I have been in those seats, too, and at the moment I think I wouldn’t have traded them for these. I was very glad that I hadn’t forgotten my driving glasses, and wished a little that we had brought opera glasses or binoculars.

I had read on the website that food, drink and photography were not allowed in the Arena, so we hadn’t brought anything but the cushions. However, it was still a rather hot evening, a lot of people had brought water and vendors were going around loudly selling water and cola. I was feeling thirsty, so I bought a Coke for an exorbitant five euros, and shared it with Mary Joy. They were also selling programs and libretti and renting maroon-colored seat cushions.

Various announcements were made, first in Italian, then German, then English, then French. Every so often, a man in a Chinese costume would come out and play on a gong, ending with several rhythmic bangs, like a clock striking. Shortly before the nine-o’clock showtime, little birthday-cake candles were handed out. This related to a tradition. At the original Arena opera performance, a hundred years ago, there had been no lighting in the stands, so the audience had been given candles. Since then, audiences have been given candles to light before every performance.

It was announced that the spotlights would swirl around, and whomever in the audience they finally landed on would receive some special prize, I couldn’t hear what. The spotlights landed on a couple on the other side of the stadium, and they were led down the steps, to what end, I know not.

The candles were lit.  This was a little problematic at first, since we didn't have matches or a lighter.  Eventually, someone near us got a light from someone else, and we got a light from them. The sight of thousands of little lights around the arena was impressive.

Finally, the gong player came on for the last time, the orchestra tuned and the conductor appeared from a gate to the left and went down the ramp to the orchestra pit, to the applause of the audience. Then the orchestra started playing and immediately we were in an ancient, mythical “Peking,” whose people were waiting impatiently for the moon to rise, so that they could witness the execution of the Prince of Persia.

Turandot was Giacomo Puccini’s last opera, based on one of the exotic fantasies of the 18th-century Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi, in turn based on a Persian folk tale. The story is relatively simple, if, like most opera plots, at least a little ridiculous. Princess Turandot, only child of the elderly Emperor of China, is, of course, expected to marry. However, channeling the spirit of an ancestress who was raped by barbarians, she wants nothing to do with men. She prevails upon her father to promise that she will only be required to marry the prince who can answer three riddles, and any who fails will lose his head. You’d think that this would deter any sane prince from trying his luck, but, unfortunately, Turandot is so extremely beautiful that any prince who lays eyes on her already, in one sense at least, loses his head. The latest unfortunate guesser is the Prince of Persia, who is to be executed tonight.

Into this situation arrives another royal personage, the deposed king Timur, on the run and incognito. As old and wobbly as the Chinese Emperor, Timur is accompanied by his son, Prince Calaf, and the devoted slave-girl Liu, who has an unrequited and hopeless love for Calaf. Calaf rails against the cold princess who will have the Persian prince beheaded just for daring to ask for her hand. Then, Turandot herself appears. The people plead for the life of the Persian, who has won their regard by how he has faced his impending doom. But Turandot is implacable, and the prince goes to his death, shouting her name.

Unfortunately, Calaf has now seen Turandot, and cannot be dissuaded from banging the gong to announce his acceptance of her challenge.

At this point the lights come up and there is a twenty-minute intermission, during which I go out to visit the restrooms, which are in a set of semi-permanent structures outside the Arena, to the north.  I’ll have to say that this was one of the least unpleasant WC experiences I’ve had at a concert performance, in the sense that there was hardly any wait to use the facilities. This appeared to be true even for the women.

In the meantime, Mary Joy had decided that my spoken summary of the opera’s plot wasn’t enough to fully understand what was going on, so she flagged down one of the wandering vendors and spent five euros to buy the libretto, set out in a book, in a number of different languages.  When I got back, she was frantically reading, trying to catch up before the lights went down.

In Act Two, the stage is opened up to a spectacularly gorgeous vision of a fantastic, golden Forbidden City. The feeble Emperor is helped in, and tries to persuade Calaf not to throw his life away. But it’s in vain, and Turandot recites the first riddle. After some hesitation, Calaf gives his answer, and the judges, one after another, read from their scrolls the same answer. The same happens with the second and then the third riddle. Calaf answers them all! The people, relieved, acclaim him.

I don’t remember what the riddles were, but in case you ever find yourself in a position where you have to answer a homicidal princess’s riddles, the answers are L’Esperanza (Hope), La Sangue (Blood) and Turandot (Turandot).

Turandot, however (the princess, not the riddle answer), is not pleased to find herself suddenly engaged to be married. She pleads with her father, unsuccessfully, to rescue her from this fate, but it’s Calaf who takes pity on her. He gives her his own riddle to solve. If she can tell him before dawn what his name is, he will forfeit his life to her.

Another twenty-minute intermission, followed by Act Three. Turandot has forbidden anyone in Peking to sleep, upon pain of death, until the name of the unknown prince is found. In the background you hear people calling “Nessun dorma!” (“No one sleep!”). Calaf appears, alone, and repeats “Nessun dorma,” launching into the opera’s most famous aria, one of the late Luciano Pavarotti’s specialties. He proclaims that love will succeed and ends with a triumphantly confident “Vincero!”-- “I will conquer!”

But that proves to be a little premature. The people of Peking, desperate to save their lives, have found Timur and Liu, who were seen consorting with the unknown prince. Turandot is called out and orders Liu’s torture, to make her tell Calaf's name. But Liu, in a heartfelt aria, tells Turandot that love makes her able to remain silent, in spite of all, and that the same love will come to the icy princess herself. Then Liu grabs a knife from a soldier and stabs herself to death. The people, won over by Liu’s sacrifice, beg her spirit not to avenge herself on them, and carry her body off, followed by the bereft Timur, leaving Calaf and Turandot alone on stage.

At this point, not only is Liu dead, but so is Puccini. By the autumn of 1924, he had composed everything before the final duet, but decided that the libretto for that duet didn’t work, and had gotten it rewritten, though not entirely finalized. One can see how it would be very difficult to get from this point in the story to where Turandot and Calaf live happily ever after together, without giving the audience whiplash from the sudden turn. Puccini died, suddenly, after writing sketches for that final duet. The composer Franco Alfani was chosen to finish the opera, and was kept on a very short leash—everything had to be seamless and based entirely on Puccini’s sketches.

So the show goes on, though at the first performance, at La Scala in Milan in 1926, the conductor, Arturo Toscanini, stopped the music at this point and the curtain came down.

In the final duet, Turandot, moved by poor Liu, opens herself to love. Calaf tells her his name, and she calls everyone to announce that she knows his name, it is Love.

General rejoicing and curtain calls ensue.

As to this production, the sets (by the 1960s and ‘70s film director, Franco Zeffirelli) and costumes were wonderful, and the young conductor, Andrea Battistoni, was deservedly given a grand ovation. The principal singers, Lise Lindstrom as Turandot, Stuart Neill as Calaf and Maria Agresta as Liu, were very good, as were the chorus and subsidiary roles. It was a wonderful experience, though Mary Joy gave up on her seat cushion after the first act, complaining that it didn’t work. I stayed with mine, though it was a little uncomfortable toward the end of the long Act One.

And so, to bed.

Wine and Cook and a Handbag

On Wednesday, August 22nd, we got up relatively early. Our breakfast had been awaiting us on the dinette table when we first entered the room the day before: one packaged croissant, a pair of slices of packaged dried toast and a pair of cookies apiece, along with little packages of Nutella (a chocolate-hazelnut spread very popular in Europe but, surprisingly, barely known in the U.S.) and jam. Coffee was make-it-yourself instant.

On this trip, unusually, all but two of our accommodations (the CabInn in Copenhagen and the apartment in Unterseen) included breakfast. Although this was by far the least of these breakfasts, it served its purpose and we didn’t feel a need to supplement it on our own.

We walked down to the Piazza del Duomo and from there followed the Via Roma and its successors to the Ponte Vecchio, the famous “Old Bridge,” covered with jewelry shops. We took a few photos and crossed to the other side of the Arno, then, as per our instructions, we walked upstream past the next bridge to the Piazza Demidoff. This is a small park taking up a small block along the Lungarno. We were supposed to be there at 9:20 for our Accidental Tourist tour, and we arrived ten minutes early. There was no one else there who looked like a tourist, accidental or otherwise, waiting for a tour, and as 9:20 approached, Mary Joy was worried that we were in the wrong place. But as we were sitting on a park bench, discussing this, a man, sixtyish, in casual clothes, came up and asked if we were Michael and Mary Joy.

This was Steve, the guide for our Wine and Cook tour. As we went to his van, he told us that we were the only people on today’s tour. Mary Joy assumed from his accent that he was British, but it turned out that he was originally from North Carolina, but had lived in Italy for the past 39 years.

We drove east, up the Arno a way, and then into the hills above Rufina. This is the area for Chianti Rufina, not actually in the province of Chianti, which is to the south, between Florence and Siena, but still one of the recognized districts for Chianti wine.

We arrived at the Villa of Grignano, built by the noble Florentine Gondi family in the fifteenth century and remodeled in the eighteenth century. It is now owned by a family of industrialists from Milan (shirt manufacturers), who don’t live there or use it much, but keep it up and run the farm, the Fattoria Grignano, more as a hobby than as a business. The farm has not only vines, but olive trees. Steve took us step-by-step through the oil-making process, then step-by-step through the wine-making process. Very interesting. At the moment, the place was very quiet: there was one guy there, washing out some plastic containers. But he told us that that would change in another week, when the white grape harvest would begin. The overwhelming majority of the farm’s, and the area’s, production is of red grapes, for Chianti (made almost entirely from sangiovese grapes) and Super-Tuscan (made with other grapes, such as merlot and cabernet sauvignon) wines, but some white wines are made here. The red grape harvest was still several weeks away.

We did meet one inhabitant of the Fattoria: a kitten just a few days old, living in a cardboard box on the platform where olives would be collected. The olive gatherers still work for a share of the crop, as their ancestors always have, and here was where that was figured out. Steve said that there were other cats on the farm, but since they were neither mad dogs nor Englishmen, age and experience had taught them to find hidden, shady places in which to siesta at this time of day.

Then we had a tasting, first, of the olive oil, with bread, followed by five wines: a white, the standard red, the better red (aged longer, in red oak casks), the “Gran Riserva” (made of grapes grown on a special hillside, with its own soil and microclimate, and aged even longer, in smaller white oak casks) and the “Vin Santo,” a sweet, amber-colored dessert wine, with higher alcohol content. We ended up buying a small bottle of the oil and a bottle of the “Gran Riserva.”

While we were doing our tasting, Steve sang for us very beautifully from a medieval mass. When he had finished, Mary Joy asked if it were by Perotin (who worked in Paris around 1200, as Wikipedia tells me), and he said yes. It turns out that Steve came to Italy to study music. He is a counter-tenor and part of a local ancient music ensemble.

Then we drove back down into the Arno valley and back up into the hills, for the second part of our “Wine and Cook” tour. We drove up an increasingly difficult road, ending up at a house on top of a hill, surrounded by an olive grove. The oldest part of this house had been a medieval tower. We went around and entered the basement, where there was a large table, on which were mounted a number of pasta-making crank machines.

Steve brought in three eggs and some durum wheat pasta flour. We each measured out our flour, then poured it in a little heap on the table. We turned that heap into a ring of flour, with an open space in the middle, and into that space we broke our egg. Then we mixed the flour and egg, kneading the dough until it regained its shape if you pressed your thumb into it.

Next, we divided the dough into two balls. We took one of these balls, flattened it into a disk, and Steve showed us how to run it through the machine, changing the settings, to make it gradually much longer and flatter. Then we get metal rings (like parts of cans), two or three inches in diameter, and use them to cut out round pieces of dough. Steve put together a filling from spinach and ricotta cheese (he chopped the spinach very quickly with a half-moon-shaped knife blade, that he rocked back and forth), and after flouring our dough pieces we used a spoon to drop globs of filling on the middle of each. We shaped each glob into a little ridge across the center, then folded the dough up over it, eliminating any air pocket, and tamped down the edge with our thumb. The last step was to use a special implement or a fork to scallop the edges, and now we had our ravioli!

Now it was the turn of the other half of the dough, which, like the first ball, we ran through the press at increasingly narrow settings, until we had the same sort of long, flat dough sheet as before. This time, however, we cut this dough into five or six shorter lengths. We shifted the crank from the press part of the pasta machine to the cutting part, arranged the setting, and ran through our dough: presto, tagliatelle! Steve saved one piece of dough to run through on the angel-hair setting, and we were done making pasta! He said that fresh pasta such as this would be faster to cook than dry pasta: only about three minutes.

We then went upstairs to meet the mistress of the house, Cristiana. She greeted us warmly and sat us at the table in her kitchen, which, on the one hand, was a pleasant Tuscan farmhouse kitchen, but, on the other hand, had up-to-date appliances. She, in spite of a foot injury, had been busy in that kitchen. She had contemplated making pizza, but had decided against it because of the heat (the kitchen was not air-conditioned). While it does get very hot there during the summer, usually the heat breaks by the middle of August. This year, a drought year in Italy, that hadn’t happened yet (though temperatures were apparently going to cool substantially the day after we were to fly to Holland).

Instead, Cristiana had made an appetizer from Bresaola (a dried, salted beef from the Valtellina, on the Swiss border—we went through there two years ago after our ride on the Bernina Express) and cheese. In addition, she had made a rice salad. With this we drank some red wine. It was all very good.

Now she cooked our pasta. Mary Joy will remember the sauces. All I remember is that they were delicious. Meanwhile Steve put a CD on the sound system. This was the local band that his son belongs to. Steve called its genre “rockabilly,” but there was a lot of western swing and even bluegrass in their sound—I’ll swear that their cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” had a banjo.

Dessert was a homemade sorbet—very good. Cristiana said that her ice cream maker had been much harder to work, because of the heat. We sat and chatted for a while. Both opera fans, they were envious when we told them that the next night we would be hearing Turandot at the Arena in Verona. Cristiana’s husband stopped by for a few minutes. Retired, he is somewhat older than she is. Steve later told us that he had been a racecar driver and scuba diver and instructor.

Now it was time to say goodbye to Cristiana and drive back to Florence, where we said goodbye to Steve at Piazza Demidoff.

It had been a delightful day. This was not a full-scale cooking class, like Mary Joy had taken near Radda in Chianti in 2007, but it was fun nonetheless, and Steve was a terrific guide. Accidental Tourist is a little pricey (though not as pricey as some), but we would still recommend it.

Since we were relatively near the Santa Croce church, which we had missed the last time we were in Florence, we crossed the river and went straight there. In the church are some nice fourteenth-century paintings by Giotto and his workshop, but the principal reason to visit Santa Croce is because of who is buried there. Who isn’t buried there, though he has a very large memorial in the church, is the poet Dante Alighieri. He would be buried there if he had died in his native Florence, but in his later years he was a political exile and died in Ravenna (his actual tomb is one of the sights of Ravenna that we didn’t get to in our evening there). The Florentines, repentant, asked for the great poet’s body, but Ravenna said: “Tough luck. You didn’t want him when he was alive; you’re not going to get him back now that he’s dead.” Florence does supply the oil for the perpetual light at his tomb.

I was surprised to see the tomb of Gioachino Rossini. I’m not sure how that man-of-the-world ended up buried in Florence, since he began life in Pesaro, on the Adriatic coast in Le Marche, and ended it as a Parisian. I forgot to thank him for the music we’d heard accompanying Wilhelm Tell in Interlaken.

Next was Niccolo Machiavelli, like Dante exiled from Florence, but unlike him now back home. He generally has had a bad reputation, even if the princes he wrote for would publicly decry him, while privately following his advice. There aren’t many people who have had their name turned into an adjective: I suppose that to be “machiavellian” is better than to be “sadistic”, just as one would probably rather have been Machiavelli than the Marquis de Sade. Still, it can’t be a good thing if your reputation is such that you’re the evil villain in an episode of the old TV series “Time Tunnel.”

Michelangelo didn’t die in Florence, either (Rome, instead), but at least he asked to be buried here. Across the church from him is Galileo, who at least died in the area. Galileo's problem was that he couldn't die anywhere else, because he was under permanent house arrest, due to his ideas about the earth going around the sun.

I’ll have to say that the only time I felt strongly moved to be at the tomb of a famous person (other than being moved to anger while at the proto-fascist tomb of Napoleon in Paris) took me completely by surprise. On a bus tour of England in 1986, we were visiting Stratford on Avon, where we had toured Shakespeare’s birthplace. On the spur of the moment, I decided to run (there wasn’t much time before the bus left) to the not-nearby church where he was buried. When I got there and saw his tomb, in the floor of the sanctuary, I felt a sort of awe, as if I were in the presence of something that mattered very much. I haven’t felt that way before or since about anyone’s tomb.

Near Santa Croce was a gelateria that Steve had recommended. Vivoli is very different from Grom. It’s more of a tea-room, with gelateria attached almost as an afterthought. But the gelato is just as good.

It was nearing eight o’clock, and Mary Joy had to do some shopping before the street stalls were pulled up for the night. Mary Joy likes purses. She doesn’t go overboard about it. She is not the Imelda Marcos of handbags. But she likes purses. And here she was in the leather capital of Italy.

Early in our relationship, I was in Spain, in Granada, and knowing her liking for purses, I decided to go to the market and buy one for her. The market in Granada was something like the street stalls in Florence, only more concentrated, a dense, tangled den of commerce, something like a souk or bazaar in Morocco.

I found the purse I was looking for: beige, made of Moroccan leather.

“Habla Usted ingles?” I asked the vendor.

“No,” he replied. “Nederlands?”

It still seems a little odd to me that a vendor at a market in Spain, probably a Moroccan, knew how to speak Dutch but not English.

“No. Frances?” I replied, without thinking, since my Spanish was just as good as my French (now it’s a lot better, or, rather, my French is a lot worse, from lack of use).

So we haggled in French, and soon Mary Joy had a new purse.

But that was a long time ago, and that purse was now defunct. Mary Joy focused on a particular purse in one of the street stalls near San Lorenzo, even as they were starting to take the goods into the adjacent shop. I stayed out of the way, and after ten minutes or so, she had another new purse, with more than ten percent knocked off the original asking price.

We left our loot off at the apartment, then went out to see if we could get a table at Coquinarius. We, as well as the couple behind us, were told that there would be a forty-five minute wait. It was nine o’clock, and the other couple apparently decided to try their luck elsewhere. Mary Joy and I discussed the situation then went back to the host, a youngish bearded guy, and said that we would like to be on the list for the next available table. He recognized us from the night before and told us that it would be more like thirty-five minutes, and that he would remember us.

So we went to the Piazza del Duomo, looked at the famous bronze doors of the Baptistery (copies: the originals are safe indoors). And did some people-watching. When we went back to Coquinarius, we soon had a table. Mary Joy had a salad with fish in it, while I had pork loin. Like the night before, all very good. The staff of the restaurant, at least those two nights, was small (four people, as far as I could tell) and young (twenties or thirties).

Afterwards, back to Soggiorno Pezzati and bed.

A Room With(out) a View

On Tuesday, August 21st, we took the regional train back to Bologna, then the fast train to Florence, arriving a little after noon. We walked from the station into the San Lorenzo neighborhood, ending up at an apartment building, on a street of other apartment buildings. There we rang the bell for Soggiorno Pezzati and were let in. There was a dark, narrow hallway back to the stairs, with two private apartments on the ground floor, another two on the first floor (second, in America) and finally, on the second floor (American third) was the heavy metal door for Soggiorno Pezzati B&B. There we were met not by Signora Pezzati, who, like most other Italians, was away on vacation, but by a very pleasant young woman (apparently of South Asian ancestry), who checked us in and showed us into our room (one of the apartments on that floor). Since there was some question as to whether she would be there when we would leave on Thursday morning, it was decided to pay her immediately.

The room was very pleasant, with the picture of God giving life to Adam, from the Sistine Chapel, over the bed. The bathroom was small, but the fixtures (including a bidet, as in all our Italian accommodations except Al Campaniel in Venice) were new and modern in style. The light coming in through the large window reminded me of the film A Room With a View, which was set in Florence. The only view that we had, however, was of some roofs and a neigbor’s balcony. That was true throughout this trip. None of our rooms looked out onto scenery. They tended to be quiet and interior-facing, which was fine with us..

It was lunch time, so we went out in search of a Lonely Planet-approved sandwich shop. First we looked in our own neighborhood, around the Mercato Centrale, which was a block-and-a half south of our B&B. By now lunchtime was over and there wasn’t anything of interest around the market, except, for Mary Joy, the stalls full of purses, scarves, etc., in the streets surrounding the market.

So went down the Via dei Tornabuoni (a high-class shopping street) toward the river and turned into the Via del Parione, looking for a particular sandwich shop. It simply wasn’t there, as far as we could tell. We went up and down the street a few times, and while there appeared to be two separate street-numbering systems, one in the teens and the other in the thirties, neither of them included the number we were looking for.

Plan C: we went down to the Lungarno (the street along the river Arno) and turned left, toward the Uffizi Gallery, and in a side street a block from the gallery, we found ‘Ino, a tiny place with a counter, where you picked up your sandwich and wine, and a small adjoining room, where you sat at one of several barrels or tables or along a counter, facing out a long window. We did the last, eating our very good sandwiches and drinking our white wine while watching through the window as tour groups of Poles or Britons were led past, in the adjoining underpass, by their tour directors, holding aloft the umbrella or brightly colored book or other highly-visible article that functioned as the banner under which he or she led the little troop into the fray, against the hordes of other tourists.

We then wandered into the Piazza Della Signoria, the main public square of Florence, with its copy of Michelangelo’s David next to the Palazzo Vecchio (Old Palace), once the seat of republican government, then the seat of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, now site of the mayor’s office.

While Mary Joy watched a street clown, who had gathered a large crowd and was getting a lot of laughs, I sat in the Loggia dei Lanzi among a crowd of statues (the best being Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus). I was feeling vaguely unwell.

Next, we visited the free public areas of the Palazzo Vecchia. Then, we decided to visit the Bargello, the former jail that was now the principal sculpture museum. All I remembered from our last time there, in 2001, were the Donatello statues and the Della Robbia ceramic sculptures. These were still the highlights of the collection, in particular, the famous Donatello David, from the 1440s, the first nude statue in Europe in a thousand years.

I was still feeling not quite right, and now so did Mary Joy. It was very hot outside. The high temperature that afternoon and the next, I discovered later, was 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius). We got a 1½-liter bottle of cold water and drank two-thirds of it in ten minutes, immediately feeling much better. So we went to the Grom in the narrow streets south of the Piazza del Duomo and had our gelato fix.

Then we went into the Duomo, or cathedral, overwhelming on the outside, but less impressive on the inside. Afterwards, we went into the Baptistery, its dome filled with wonderful 13th-century mosaics.

Over the time we were in Florence, we found ourselves going back and forth a number of times between our room and the Piazza del Duomo, to the point that we had the not-long-but-fairly-complicated route memorized. The Piazza itself, large as it is, even with the huge cathedral, the tall bell tower and the Baptistery, filling the center, was never jam-packed by its crowds of tourists. On the north side, near the horse-drawn buggies waiting for paying passengers, was a line of six ambulances. Occasionally, one would pick up a heat-stroked tourist and head off, leaving a gap in the lineup.

In the piazza and its side streets, as was the case wherever we went in Italy, were the street vendors, mostly African or North African, selling pretty much the same stuff everywhere. You would pass someone standing with a blue or beige ball in his hand and he would suddenly throw it down onto a board. Splat! It would be spread out, a semi-liquid, gooey mess. Then, it would draw itself together again and in a few seconds there would be the original ball, like a movie monster that you think has been obliterated, but its constituent molecules pull themselves together and suddenly the creature is whole again and ready for mayhem!

Or you would be dragging your luggage up the steps of a hump-backed bridge in Venice, and at the top would be an African tending his pile of purses. Or a pair of vendors would scoop up the prints of famous local (and not-so-local) paintings that they had laid out near the Loggia dei Lanzi: the police had been seen nearby!

But most common, especially where there were kids, were the vendors of the little toy (I never got close enough to see exactly what it was) that you would throw high up in the air and it would flash and sparkle with blue lights.

Our route back to our room led from the northwest corner of the Piazza del Duomo, up the Borgo San Lorenzo, past its restaurants, with street terraces, shops, street vendors and crowds, to San Lorenzo itself, the parish church and burial place of the Medici. The streets and piazzas along the north and west sides of the church were filled with vendor stands, mostly with goods from adjoining shops. Most common was leather, for which Florence is famous: dozens of stands, carrying hundreds of leather jackets, thousands of purses, millions (well, maybe not) of belts, in all shapes, sizes and colors.

Interestingly, this bazaar shuts down at 8 p.m., and the stalls are cleared of their goods, taken into the neighboring shops, and dismantled. Soon nothing is left in the streets but bottles, wrappers and other trash. And eventually the street-sweeping machines come along.

After running this gantlet along the long north side of San Lorenzo, we would turn right and go up a block, where it would begin again with the stalls in the streets around the Mercato Centrale.

This Central Market is a large, indoor food market. The streets outside, however, are dedicated to the same leather goods, scarves, souvenirs, etc. that you find around San Lorenzo. But after navigating the streets on the south and west sides of the market, we’re finally clear of the stalls and in the home stretch. This part of Via Panicale is the corner of an immigrant neighborhood. There are Pakistani groceries and restaurants and African beauty salons. At the end of the street some African men would usually hang out, but we never felt threatened, even at the time when there was a police car there and somebody was being arrested. We certainly never had the urge to walk down the middle of the street shouting operatic arias.

We would cross the Via Guelfa to Via San Zanobi, and in half a block we would be at Soggiorno Pezzati.

After freshening up, we headed back toward the Duomo, and to the south, near Grom, we found another Lonely Planet recommendation, Coquinarius, which, luckily, had an opening. It’s basically a wine bar with a large menu of appetizers and primi, and a very small selection of main courses. Mary Joy had a carpaccio (marinated raw beef) plate, which she liked very much, while I had a salad with chicken breast, also very good. Then, rather late in the evening, we returned to our room.