Saturday, September 18, 1999

The next morning we got together early to board the bus for our tour of Florence. As we were gathering I heard the most novel answer to a customer complaint. Someone complained that the lights in their room were too dim. Actually, this is a common complaint since all the hotels that we’d been in had used various types of florescent light to save energy. What I liked was the way the hotel staff at the Londra answered it.

"Don’t worry," explained the man at the front desk to the complaining tourist. "The lights will get brighter as it gets darker outside."

As good a lesson in relativity as I have ever heard.

We also learned why the redhead wanted a room of her own. It probably had less to do with her parents snoring than it did with the fact that she was planning to meet a boyfriend in Florence. She was having on-going discussions with Enzo about when and how the boyfriend could join the tour group. He couldn’t ride on the bus or join any of the paid tours, but it he paid for his own ticket to the museums and so on, there wasn’t any reason why he couldn’t be there when we were.

Our bus heads out the south gate of Florence. All the old cities of Italy were once walled cities. Here, you can still see part of the original walls of Florence. By the old gate, a tall modern sculpture stands. It is a woman. She has another figure of a woman balanced on her head. It looks like they both might tip over. Enzo tells is that this modern sculpture is not very popular.

The first stop on the itinerary was the Plaza Michelangelo on a hillside just outside the city. The hill gives you a beautiful view of Florence, one of the prettiest cities anywhere. It was a little foggy on the morning we were there, but the view was still magnificent. There were about three hundred busses disgorging tourists to enjoy it together.

This was the perfect spot for the group photo of a tour group. Indeed, dozens of photographer make their living providing pictures for the hundreds of tour groups. We discover that we will have the opportunity to buy the picture later. Mom is incensed. She’s been on many tours and they’ve all given you a picture as part of the fee.

After the picture taking, we again have plenty of time to hang around and prowl the gee-gaw shops. The cards look exactly like the ones we saw the day before in Pisa. I vaguely suspect that they are following our bus around.

There was also a huge something at the Plaza Michelangelo put on by the Swatch company. It was called the Swatch Wave and involved lots of big tents, a bunch of bleachers and a huge above ground pool of water. We will never know what merriment was planned because it was closed when we were there.

On the way back into Florence, we got a little bad news. The tour of Florence didn’t include a visit to the Uffizi Art Gallery. This was okay, but we learn that it was too late to make reservations for the weekend at the Uffizi. Reservations can only made during the weekdays. We would only be in Florence for the weekend. This was a disappointment since one of my favorite things in Florence is the Botticelli’s at the Uffizi.

This news put me in a complaining mood. I complained to Enzo about the beds at the Londra.

"No bed is as good as the one you leave at home," he said wisely.

I suspected that all tour guides get a book called, "How to Deflect Common Tourist Complaints." The homily about the bed at home is clearly in it. The answer about the lights getting brighter as it gets darker outside probably is too. I wondered what the book had to say if you complained about the smell from the toilets.

After discussing the Uffizi with the family, Michele, Rebecca, and I decided we’d try to go early Sunday morning without reservations. All the Italians should be at church, so we thought that maybe the crowds wouldn’t be so bad.

Next, the bus dropped us near Fine Arts Academy, the museum that contains Michelangelo’s David. Enzo introduced us to our day guide Niccolo who will take us through the museum and onto the Duomo. Once nice thing about being on a tour is that we don’t have to wait very long to get into these museums. There are a lot of tour groups going through, but it seems timed out well to keep out waiting to minimum.

The guide took us into the museum. A row of unfinished Michelangelo statues leads you up to the imposing David. The guide explains the unfinished "Prisoners," "St. Mark," and finally a Pieta that experts now think is not a Michelangelo at all, but possibly a work by his students. We learn that Michelangelo, unlike other sculptures in marble, didn’t make models of his work before he made them. Instead, he carved the live marble in real time, freeing the image he found within. The sad fact is that he finished hardly anything he started.

The one work he did finish, when he was only twenty-eight, was the colossal David. It stands about fifteen feet. The town fathers originally commissioned David to stand outside Florence’s city hall, or old castle, where it stood for hundreds of years. They moved it inside about a hundred years ago to protect it from pollution. A replica now stands in front of city hall in its place. Unfortunately, in moving it, they broke off one of its arms. Damage that would have taken years outside with pollution was thereby accomplished overnight. More sinisterly, a crazy man damaged the toes of the statue with a hammer. Michelangelo in particular seems to attract these crazies. Maybe because his work is so perfect it is just asking to be flawed.

The guide, Niccolo, pointed out that Michelangelo did not portray David as a boy, but as a man. It is true that David is well muscled, but to me, his head was clearly too big his body. I felt that he is a boy, simply lean and fit. He clearly hadn’t spent much time sitting in front of the television. The guide said that part of the genius is how the expression changes as you move around the statue. When you face the front of the body, David’s face looks off to the right. This is the moment that he sees Goliath. He looks calm and concentrated. As you move to the right to see his full face, however, the expression seems to change. This the moment that David decides to fight. The guide said that you can see the resolution in his face. I could see the resolution, but I also saw something else. I saw a trace of fear. It is that trace that makes the resolution and determination on David’s face so beautiful.

I leave feeling what I felt the first time I saw David, over twenty years ago: this is the most perfect work of art every made by that hand of man. The perfection of Michelangelo’s best work draws the crazies like flies. It is a powerful force.

After seeing David, the guide led us to the Duomo. Our group wound its way through the growing press of tourist. We are walking behind the rest of our group, and I find myself looking at them like a pickpocket. Which would be the best target? My favorite was the Tall, Skinny, Gray-Haired Guy. He was a man in his sixties who wore his wallet in his rear pocket. It bulged out, fat and juicy looking. There are several ladies’ whose purses are also tempting. Plastic Surgeon Lady doesn’t seem to be paying much attention at all. If I had a motor scooter, I could easily drive buy and get hers. Fortunately, our little family group is tight. All the women have a tight hold on their purses, plus I know that they have nothing in them. They hidden the real stuff in money belts. Of couse, I have my wallet, but it is zipped and velcroed into a pocket on my thigh. It’s so tightly sealed that I can barely get it out.

At the Duomo, the tour planning breaks down for the first time. The line of tourists already at the church is too long. We won’t be able to get into the church. The church strikes me as so much dirtier than it was twenty some years ago when I last say it. As we round the corner to the front, it is beautifully restored, a magical work in pink and white marble. It is just as I remember it.

Niccolo then walked us over the baptistry. Unlike the rest of Europe, the Italians didn’t baptize their children in the church itself. They needed to baptize the children before they could enter the church. They first took tem to the baptistery. After the baptism, they took the children out the baptistery through the doors facing the church and welcomed them into the church. In Florence, the baptistery is famous for its golden doors fcing the Duomo. The doors are by Ghibertti, the greatest artist who ever worked in gold. These doors beautifully detailed showing stories three-dimensional scenes standing out in relief. The scenes are from the Bibles starting with Adam and Eve. Of course, these aren’t the real doors, but replicas of them. The real doors are in a church museum to protect them from pollution. I wonder if I saw the real doors twentysome years ago.

The tour concluded at the City Hall of Florence where the replica of David stands next to the entrance. Next to the City Hall, a whole flock of monumental statures are standing under a structure that consists basically of an old roof. By "monumental" I mean that each statue stands about fifteen feet tall. Put all together like they are detracts a lot from them. It looks like Florence is having a garage sale of its old statuary. Now, our tour guide said that all of these statures were originals, but several of them looked to Rebecca and I like statues we’ve seen in other museums. The roof over these statues isn’t all that great. Many of them are badly stained with rust or something dripping down. Don’t get me wrong, these are some nice statures, but if it was a garage sale, this stuff would be marked down because of condition.

This ended the tour. The City Hall is right next to the Uffizi Gallery, the museum that we couldn’t get reservations to see. Fortunately, we got some important information from Niccolo at the end of the tour about the nearby Uffizi.

"If you don’t have reservations," he told us, "Don’t go Sunday morning. It is the museum’s busiest time. All the Japanese tour groups go their first thing on Sunday. The best time to go is Saturday night, after nine. The museum is open until midnight, so you have plenty of time and there are seldom any crowds."

Of course, we’d thought that the best time to go would be Sunday morning. It never occurred to us that the museum was open late on Saturday. You can’t be logical when you are a tourist. You need good, solid information. On of the biggest advantages of being on a tour, as opposed to touring on your own, is that you do occasionally get good, relevant information. The day tours we’d been on had all been very informative. Rebecca and I had seen many the same places on our own before, but have the guide with us taught us a lot we would have never learned on our own. You do get some good information from guide books, but the tour guides, when they are good, are so much better. Especially if you are lazy as I am.

Just beyond the Uffizi is the river Arno that flows through the middle of Florence. Since we were so close, Mom, Michele, Rebecca and I walked down to the Arno and over to the Ponte Vechio, the oldest bridge in Florence. Actually, ponte vecchio means "old bridge" in Italian. .

We’d seen the masses of tourists on our walking tour, but within our group, we had been somewhat insolated from them. Now that it was just the four of us, we were instantly buffeted by the currents of tourists as we moved toward the old bridge. They overflowed onto the streets. Every time a car or motor scooter came by, they would try to fit on the sidewalk to get out of the way, but the crowds wouldn’t fit on the sidewalk.

Of course, the sidewalk wasn’t like sidewalks you have here, a regular width all along the road. Its width varied dramaticaly as you walked along. It changed in front of each building. Sometimes it would disappear entirely. Nor should you envision it as a side walk of level cement like you see in a city in the States. Like the streets, the stidewalks are build of separate stones. Each stone is a different size. Sometimes they are small and uneven. Others, they are large an flat. All the stones are worn with age. Nothing is smooth and even in the old parts of these cities. This, of course, is what gives these areas their charm. It can also give you a sprained ankle if you aren’t paying attention to your footing.

We made our way upstream against the current of tourists along the cobbled streets and sidewalks toward the old bridge. The crowd grew more and more dense as we approached it. The Ponte Vecchio isn’t just a bridge, it is a prime shopping area. Ancient jewelry stores with big display windows line both sides of the bridge. The crowd of tourist flows pretty quickly in the middle of the bridge, but slowly at the sieds as tourists look at all the jewelry in the windows.

This was the first place I’d been in Italy where you could actually see the pickpockets working the crowd. The pickpockets weren’t in the fast flowing middle, nor were they in the slow steam looking in the windows. They moved between the two. Instead of looking in the windows, they were looking at the tourists looking at the windows. They were window shopping themselves for the easiest targets. There weren’t a lot of them. I saw one or two as we crossed over the bridge. I didn’t see any of them rob any one, but they stood out from the gawking tourists and the busy pedestrian traffic as clearly as day.

We got over the bridge without going into any of the jewelry stores, but it was lunchtime. The women’s estrogen was low. I remember a cute restaurant on the other side of the Arno from the last time I was here twenty years before. I was gently herding everyone toward it at as quickly a pace as window shopping would allow. We made good progress, crossing the bridge and turning up one of the streets near the river. Then we came to a kitchen store, one of Rebecca’s certain weakness, and had to go inside. Fortunately, everyone was hungry enough so that we didn’t get really stuck there. Many items were handled, but none were chosen. After the requisite number of "isn’t this cute!" and "isn’t this darlings!" we got out alive.

We came to the restaurant. It was much as I remembered except that the interior had been remodeled. We were fortunate enough to get a table for four out on the balcony. We had seats overlooking the Arno. Mom and I tried one of Florence’s special dishes, bread soup. It was good but salty. I followed it with another specialty of the house, boar stew, and that was extremely tasty. Everyone was very satisfied by their meal. We shared our traditional caraffe of wine to ease the soreness of our feet from walking over all the uneven services.

Replenished and nourished, the women we up to some serious shopping. On the way back to the Ponte Vecchio, we came across a ceramics shop that was still open. As I mentioned before, nost of the shops in Italy close in the early afternoon, but this isn’t true in the intense shopping areas such as those near the Ponte Vecchio. All the women were seriously interested in Italian ceramics. This was the first store with a large selection that we’d seen on the trip.

At this point, Mom told me a secret. Apparently, she’d read an article before the trip about some restaurants in Italy that gave you a souvenir dish when you ordered the house specialty. She’d seen these dished in the States, but they wanted fifty dollars each for them. They were cute—almost darling. They had the name of the restaurant and an illustration on them. Michele and Mom were hoping to find them in the ceramic or kitchen stores. They hadn’t told us about them because she’d wanted to surprise Rebecca with them as a gift. (I had recently made Rebecca a large rack for decorative plates in our kitchen and since we’ve added plates to the list of things we need to collect.) Unfortunately, they hadn’t seen them. About this same time, Michele was whispering the same information to Rebecca, though we didn’t find that out until later that night. .

The thought was very nice, but clearly, we weren’t going to find these plates in stores. We would find them in the restaurants that gave them away. We’d get them when we ordered their special meal. This seemed to be the whole idea. This was way they had the name of the restaurant on them, not the name of the ceramic store that sold them.

Now, we were on a tour that did not, let me reiterate, did not include meals. We were visiting all the major cities of Italy without a clue about where to eat. We’d gotten some great meals thus far, but due only luck and the plethora of good restaurant in Italy. If we had a list of those restaurants that gave plates, we would have had some direction in our aimlessly wanted around looking for meals every night. Finding restaurants wasn’t difficult, but knowing where we were going might also be fun.

Unfortunately, neither she nor her and Michele hadn’t gotten a list of these restaurants. There were about seventy of them in Italy. They’d hoped that we’d might run into them or the plates somewhere. Since there are easily ten thousand of more restaurants in Italy, the odds seemed a little against our running into these restaurants. I told Mom that I doubted that we’d see them in ceramic and kitchen shops. If they had told me, I could have gotten on the Internet and maybe gotten a list of them, but since they didn’t tell me, we were much out of luck.

"We wanted it be a surprise," Mom explained.

"I understand," I said. "And if we accidentally run into one of these restaurants, I will be surprised."

To make herself feel better, Mom did find some other cute plates to buy. Fortunately, there is no apperant shortage of cute plates in Italy. It is the cute ceramic capital of the world. The girls had a wonderful time and wanted to come back latter. The male clerk was clearly happy for the business, but he gave me a sympathetic look. He didn’t speak any English which is a fun experience and a rare one in this tourist heave town. There were many fewer tourists the far side of the Arno, than on the other side.

I practiced my Italian while the girl’s shopped asking him when he was open over the next few days. He was very helpful. He asked how much Italian I knew. I tried to say I can read a little, but not speak much. I clearly didn’t make myself understood. Thinking about it later, I realized that instead of saying, "posso leggere.." which might mean "I can read." I said "sono letto" which means "I am a bed." This may seem incredible stupid, but the past participle of the verb "to read" is "letto" which is the same as the noun "letto" which means bed.

We made our way past the pickpockets on the Ponte Vecchio. This time, though, the women visited several of the jewelry shops. Interestingly enough, everything they sell is gold. Even if it looks like silver, it is white gold. And they sell it by the ounce. In other words, the workmanship or design doesn’t matter. You buy the gold by the ounce. Nothing has price tags. When you want to know the price of something, they weight if for you. They multiply the number of ounces—or rather grams, since Italy uses the metric system—times the price per gram. You would think that this system would preclude selling any finely detailed work, but there is so much competition, you can find anything.

The gold shops also introduced us to the tax refund system. If we spent more than three hundred lira, we could get a twenty percent of the price back from the government because that was what we were paying in taxes. "Of course," the shop keepers told us, "You can get an instant rebate if pay cash." This meant that if we paid them cash, we wouldn’t have to pay the tax because they wouldn’t pay the tax. This turned out to be a common system in Italy.

After going through the Ponte Vecchio, open shops became harder and harder to find. We started working our way through the streets to the Londra. Just a few blocks away, we passed a courtyard lit by tiny white lights. It was the entrance to a restaurant. We’d found a nice place nearby for dinner. We got back to the hotel to rest up in the room before getting ready for dinner.

While we were resting, I watched some Italian television. I started with CNN and BBC, both all news stations. There was a special on BBC about child labor in Africa. We don’t get a lot of African news in the United States, but I think that is because it is so depressing. Child labor in Africa is particularly depressing.

In most cases, when I hear about child labor, I don’t have the politically-correct "oh-how-terrible" reaction. My first thought is that the alternative is probably starvation. We spoil our kids in the U.S. We mistakenly think kids in other places have the same options. We think the alternative to a child working is going to school and playing video games. I think Kathy Lee’s heart is in the right place keeping child labor out of factories that make her products for K-Mart. But is she doing good? By denying the kids work in a clothing factory, we almost certainly condemning them to something worse. They wouldn’t be working in the factory if they had a lot of better alternative.. It is only our arrogance that makes us think working is the worst possible fate for a child. After all, even in the U.S. we are only a few generations from conditions where children had to work to support the family.

One of the things worse than working in clothing factories is the child labor in Africa. The main job for children in parts of Africa is prostitution. The state tries to protect these children from their parents by putting them in schools, but their parents are eager to pick them up on the weekends. That is the busiest time for the sex trade. Other children are sold as slaves in the Sudan to support their parents drug habits. Apparently the going price is about sixty dollars per child. Kathy Lee would be doing them all huge favor opening a factory that just employed children.

I could speculate about the political and social forces that prevent us from hearing more about problems in Africa in the United States, but it is all so depressing.

I switch from the news to Italian television. I discover can watch a lot of the children’s programming with a glimmer of understanding. Remember what I said about Italy’s love of the cell phone? Well, they even have a children’s cartoon based upon super-heros that are basically cell phones. The heroes wear colorful costumes with phone dial numbers on their chest. Pretty cool, eh?

Of course, I couldn’t really understand the dialogue. I imagined that it went something like this.

"Oh no, I picked up a stray cell signal," says the red phone guy. "It is the evil doers. They have planted a bomb on an airplane!"

"Let’s call the police!" says the blue phone girl.

"Wait, there’s a busy signal at police headquarter!" says yellow phone guy.

"Let join our signals and maybe we can override the busy signal!" say the green phone girl.

The link hands. Their call gets through. The plane is saved! They use their super caller ID powers to track down the criminals and have them arrested. Another victory for cellular technology!

To celebrate, the phone kids call on their cell phones to order a pizza!

The commercial in the cartoon was for—and this is really, really, true—cell phones for kids. Brightly colored real phone that look like turtles and kitty cats. Actually, the whole cartoon might have been a commercial for children’s cells phone. The line between entertainment and advertising is apparently as blurry in Italy as it is in the U.S. when it comes to children’s products. Just think, if the kids all have cell phones, they can call each other to talk about the latest adventure of the cell phone kids on television. Maybe as they are making that call they’;; intercept a call from bad guys wanting to blow up something else! Life imitates art.

How much do these people pay for cell time? Is they like some government program where everyone has a right to so many free minutes a month. I am stunned by the amount of cellular use I see on the streets. If they are advertising cell phone for kids, how cheap can each minute be? It might be worth twenty-two cents a minute to save an airplane from a bomb, but to discuss the action.

That evening, we dressed and went out early for dinner. We wanted to finish so we can go to the Uffizi after dinning. We walked to the restaurant with the cute courtyard. When we entered, we were the first patrons. The lights in the dinning room were mostly off. The staff was in sitting at some of the tables, having their own meal. However, when they saw us, they swung into action. They swept away their dishes, turned on the lights and met us in the entry. They treated us like royalty who found the servants lounging around the fire. Even though we didn’t have reservations, we were immediately seated.

When we got the menu, we discovered that the restaurant specializes in fish. Of course, we suspected that it might be a fish restaurant when we came it. By the door, it had a display case filled with fish on ice. In the U.S., fish on display just lay there, flat, like they are sleeping on their sides. In Italy, they display their fish on ice differently. Their bodies arch in an artistic curve, as if they are leaping out of the ice. Their heads with open mouths stick straight up. They look like they are still fighting the hook. This was the first restaurant where we saw this type of display, but it wasn’t the last. It makes our typical frozen fish display look like a still life.

Looking at the menu, we also discover that this restaurant is expensive. At least, it is more expensive than the other restaurants we’ve been in. We didn’t mind the price though. The service was great. The wine was the best yet—and almost certainly the most expensive. I am the big fish eater in the group, so I was happy. Rebecca wasn’t in the mood for fish, though. We’d been hearing about how great Florentine beef was. There was a steak on the menu. So she order the steak. All of our food was good. Her steak was great! The moral is never to overlook the steak in a seafood restaurant or, as we all know, that Rebecca is lucky. . Her steak was so good that I resolved to order Florentine steak the next night where ever we ate.

As we eat, the restaurant gradually filled. At four separate tables, couples of Japanese order. They seemed to order separately, but they all apparently ordered the same items. Every time a course came out, it came out in eights, two of the same dish for each of the four tables. I wondered if some special Japanese menu offered only a single multi-course meal. Or is Japanese taste so consistent that they all ordered the same meals independently? It was odd enough that the male and female halves of each couple ordered the same thing, but to have each couple order the same. Maybe this restaurant had a specific meal recommended in Japanese Tourist Magazine.

It occurs to me that I have gradually changed my thinking about the cost of restaurants in Europe. When I first came to Europe some twenty-odd years ago, I thought that meals in restaurants were inexpensive. Now, we expect to pays as much as we would at home for similar service. This restaurant had very nice service and a very polished white-tablecloth look, and we paid for it. Of course, when I was younger, I wouldn’t have come into such a nice restaurant. Though I think there has also been a change I the stanadrd of living in Europe. The cost of living, as least in the tourist areas, has certainly risen in Europe, probably faster than it has in most parts of the U.S.

Of course, we never ate as much during a meal as the Italians. They have so many course and so much too drink. One of the reasons resaurants have to be expensive is that they only get one seating a night. It almost doesn’t matter what time your reservations are. They can’t seat someone before you. An Italian meal with aperitif, antipasto, wine, pasta, main course, , salad, fruit, and desert, desert wine, and then a digestivo takes three hours. Even with our abbreviated meals, we seldom got out sooner than three. We’ve seen groups of four finish three bottles of different wine during a meal. Our little family group only got through one and a half at the most.

After the meal, we walked Mom back to the Londra, and Michele, Rebecca and I hailed a cab to takes us to the Uffizi. After the experience trying to get to the Last Supper, I am worried that the driver won’t know what the Uffizi is, but he seemed to understand it and took right off. It suddenly occurred to me that we might be heading to the Uffizi Restuarent or the Uffizi Hotel. Maybe the airport in Florence is called "the Uffizi." Fortunately, all these fears were baseless. He took us around and into the old town. We actually didn’t get tot he Uffizi, but we got close.

We didn’t get to the Uffizi because a small parade stopped the traffic. Children with musical instruments were marching down the street. They were dressed in brightly-colored renaissance outfits. They carried colorful banners. The music was marching music from about the fifteen century. It was magical.

We paid the driver and fell into step behind the marching children. We followed them around the City Hall to the plaza in front of it. It was packed to bursting with tourists. A band wearing military uniforms was up on a stage in front of the hall. The crowd parted to let the children in. A couple of three-wheeled scooters followed them into the crowd. It was the renaissance concert. We’d seen flyers about it being passed out to tourists earlier in the day. Apparently, a few thousand tourists thought it was a good idea.

We were excited to have just run into it. We listened to the first musical piece. I wanted it to be beautiful and wonderful. It was just okay. Mostly, it was crowded. The pickpockets must have been having a great time in the throng. We personally didn’t enjoy thronging it up. I don’t really know about Michele, but Rebecca and I have always been a little anti-throng in our learnings. Mostly, we’d been walking all day and we didn’t want to stand for a couple of hours and listen to music. Mostly, the music was just dull.

Now, what we really wanted to do was spend a couple of hours walking through the nearby Uffizi. We got back onto our original plan, and headed for the museum.

We were afraid that it was going to be busy because of all the tourists at the concert, but just the opposite was true. As we walked out of the plaza, the crowd dwindled to nothing. There weren’t a dozen people, in the long, open plaza between the two wings of the Uffizi. There was this eerie music echoing over the stones of the courtyard. At first, I thought that it was an echo from the concert we’d left behind. If that had been the case, it must have gotten a lot better after we left. As we drew closer, we saw that it was a lone violinist playing an electric violin with a rhythm machine. It seemed beautiful in the empty courtyard.

We then started passing entrances to the Effizi. Each one clearly said "entrance" or, more precisely, "Entratta" which is Italian for entrance, but each door was closed. Each had a sign point us further down the wing. We passed three doors, each an hundred steps apart, walking down the long stone wing of the museum. Along the way, there were all types of barriers to handle the crowds, but there weren’t any crowds. There wasn’t anyone but our little group of three trying to get it. We were beginning to worry that no entrance was open or, worse, that they were going to make us walk us all around the gallery before they let us in. Our feet were already tired.

Finally, we found an open door at the end of the wing, but there didn’t seem to be anyone one inside the room it opened to. We saw a guard and motion a question if it was okay to come in. He smiled and nodded. We walked to the room. It just had barriers to handle the crowds. We walked to the room next room. There was a counter there, gifts items and some people.

"Biglietti?" we questioned asking for tickets.

They motioned on to the next room. Apparently, they were just their to sell souvenirs. The next room was filled with more barriers for handling the crowds. The room after that had another gift counter. The room after that had more crowd control. So it went until we walked back the whole length of the museum wing back to the first, closed door that we had seen outside. This was the room where they actually sold the tickets. The entire bottom floor of this wing of the museum wing and the courtyard outside was designed to hold the crowds of people waiting to get in.

No wonder our guide had told us not to come when there were lines. They must have lines that would make Disney World jealous. Imagine waiting in that line, expecting every room to be the museum or at least the ticket counter only to find more lines. The souvenir counters must have been a pleasant relief.

Tonight, there was no one. We hadn’t seen another patron. We bought tickets and continued forward. We expected someone to take our tickets. There wasn’t anyone. We weren’t yet in the museum. We were now in the line area for those with tickets. We continued on.

We came to a giant staircase. It, like the rest of the museum, was empty. Since there was nowhere else to go, we went up. We went up one flight of stairs. We went up another flight of stairs. There was no way in. We went up another flight and another. We stopped. We took off our coats. We admired the statuary in the hall as we caught our breath. We went up another flight and another. No one else was on the staircase.

A ticket taker! We’d made it to the museum! Beyond the ticket taker we could see a hallway and actual works of art!

As he tore our tickets, we tried to ask if there was a map or plan for the layout of the museum.

He gestured downstairs.

We decided that we could wander around without knowing the layout.

We passed the ticket taker into a long hallway that ran the length of the museum wing. It had windows and statures on the right and openings to the various galleries on the left. It was dark. It was empty. During the day, it would have been lit from the light coming through the windows. At night, it was in twightlight. My first thought was that the good news was that you could get into the museum at night without waiting six hours in line. The bad news was that you couldn’t see anything.

"Welcome to Braille art appreciation!" I said, feeling a nearby stature.

Michele and Rebecca hadn’t stuck around to appreciate my witticism. They’d move on to the first gallery. It too was in twilight, but off of it was a gallery that was brightly lit. We could see people in it. We weren’t alone! As we approached, we could actually here a guide explaining the work in English.

This was actually going to be nice! It wasn’t crowded. There seemed to be many people with badges explaining the artwork. It was great. A free tour!

The Uffizi is the first museum I’ve been in that has an early warning device. When you get too close to the paintings, the room you are in starts beeping. When it first happened, I looked around to see whose cell phone was going off, but as I moved away from the painting, the beeping stopped. When I got closer, the beeping started again. This is a great idea considering the number of great paintings that have been defaced in our modern era and the alternative to some sort of warning is putting up big plexiglaass barriers in front of the paintings. I couldn’t even see the electronic system involved. I wondered what happened if you got closer. First, it probably had a louder siren. Then it probably opened fire.

Soon, we came to the Botticelli room. The reason I love the Uffizi is because of the Botticelli’s. There are two in particular, The Birth of Venus, and The Allegory of Spring.

The first is relatively simple. Venus rises naked from the sea standing in an open shell. She is being offered a robe by a figure representing the Spring. The winds are blowing her forward. What is so arresting is the look on Venus’s face as she stares out at the viewer. It is such a calm, graceful look.

The second picture is more complicated. Unlike Venus, you don’t usually buy postcards with the whole picture. It is usually divided into it separate components. The whole scene is in a forest. First, you have a young man, under the trees, reaching up, perhaps picking a fruit. Then you have three women in diaphanous gowns, dancing togther in a circle. Then you have a figure representing Venus again, full-face staring a the viewer. Above Venus is Cupid, with his bow and arrow. Next to Venus, is a figure representing Spring, also staring out at the viewer. Both look pregnant. The their left, another disheveled figure in a diaphanous gown is being picked up by a figure that looks very like the figures representing the wind in the Venus painting. All of the figures are in the foreground and about the same size. What strikes you is how disconnected they all seem from one another. No wonder they are usually shown as separate pictures. All are beautiful with the eerie beauty that only Botticelli ever captured, but they aren’t all part of the same scene.

The guide gave a simple explanation for the painting. The dancers are dancing to celebrate spring. Love and spring stand side-by-side with the spring scattering her flowers. They are pregnant to show the fertility of spring. The wind is stealing a girl from the garden.

For a moment, let me play the buck toothed nun on PBS who explains paintings.

What I see is a story. The secret of the painting unfolds if you look more carefully at the interaction between the characters. It is subtle, but notice where the characters are looking. The young man is looking up, at the tree. The three dancers are looking at one another, except for one, who is looking directly at the young man. Cupid is looking at this woman. As a matter of fact, he is aiming his bow right at her. Venus and Spring look out directly at us. The woman begin grabbed from behind is looking back at her apparent attacker.

To me, this allegory suggests a story, that unfolds. The reason that the figures aren’t apparently interacting is that we are seeing a sequence over time. We are seeing a story unfold in separate scenes.

The story begins with the maidens dancing together in the wolds. They are virgins, aware only of their beauty and grace.

Into this Eden comes a snake. This snake is a handsome young man. He is unaware of the women, but he is performing a symbolic act. The first impression you get is that he is picking fruit. This impression is correct, but if you look closer, you see that he is holding a stick, which he is poking up, though a cloud. The fruit of the tree could be an apple but to me it looks like a golden peach. It hemisphere strongly suggest another more earthly fruit.

If we look at the women, on of them doesn’t see the young man. Another seems to notice him, but the third stare straight at him, as is captivated. To resolve any confusion about what is happening, we see Cupid, not only looking at this woman, but aiming his bow at her. She is about to fall in love.

The next part of the story is shown on the left-hand side of the painting. A woman is wearing the exact same diaphanous gown that the dancers are wearing. To me, she is a dancer after she has been struck by Cupid’s arrow. Her clothers are disheveled. Her hair hangs loose. She is in the grasp of a man. The man is painted to symbolize the wind, in this case, the winds of passion. He is literally lifting her up and caring her away. Her face is wild. She is in passion’s grasp. She looks back at her captor. She is clearly terrified at her fate.

Next to her is the next page in the story. The woman is now Spring. Her clothing has changed to a gown of flowers. She is clearly pregnant. She is no longer afraid. She is no longer the unaware dancer, nor the frightened lover. She is staring straight out at us, the viewer, self-aware, smiling at her fate. She has become nature and natural. She is spreading flowers before her. She has been transformed.

Love or Venus is the center of the story and the center of the painting. She also stares out at us, proud because she is the point of this tale or, perhaps, more correctly, the mother of the tale. She is the mother of Cupid who flies above her. By giving birth to Cupid, a boy, she is also gives birth to the spark that causes the young girl’s transformation. In her, her own story comes full circle. She was the innocent, the infatuated, the impassioned, the impregnated, and. in the end, the instigator of it all.

The painting has always impressed my by the beauty of its figures, but I love the story it tells even more. Of course, I might be imagining this whole story. The author might just have been painting a bunch of pretty forms related to spring with no story in mind at all. But I like it better my way.

After Botticelli and overhearing the guide in the early rooms, we do what we call our "roller-skate tour of the rest of the museum. It is late. Our feet are tired.

As we are leaving, I spot one other painting. It is contains the same characters as Botticelli’s The Allegory of Spring, but they are all changed slight. The young man is now offering the apple to the dancer. Her fellow dancers seem huddled behind her. Next to them is the danced be carried away by the wind. It is just the first part of the story, but told more sequentially, without the confusing intervention of Spring and Love. It is a darker, smaller painting than Botticelli’s great work.

It occured to me that there are similar stories in many of the great painting in the great museums of Europe. I think that this is especially true of the great many religious works. We live in an age of images. We look at this work and think that they are like our photographs, simply striking images. We forget that the artist’s spent years working on them, thinking about them. We forget that these artists grew up in a world were the church doors and window told Bible tales to the illiterate. I think that the great painters and prehaps even the sculptors were crafting stories as well as images. These stories are there waiting for us if we take the time for them. There are thousands of these stories waiting for us to discover them.

It also occured to me that, after seeing thousands of religious paintings, I have yet to see a convincing portrait of Christ. I have seen many Madonnas that are very convincing. In the Uffizi, the great, human sadness in many of the Madonna’s faces struck us. However, none of the Christ’s look quite as real, as if the artists were intimidated trying to capture the face of the Son of God. Maybe the Moslems have the right idea about not making any images of holy figures.

Actually, thinking about it, I have seen one convincing portrait of Christ. The picture of Christ on the Shroud of Turin somehow feels more authentic than any other picture I’ve seen. I think that the latest tests have shown the Shroud to date from the Renaissance though there are still many mysteries including how the image was created on the cloth. If it is a work of Renaissance art, it is in a class by itself.

However, I wouldn’t be looking for any more stories on this night. It is late. My feet are tired. The long, darkened corridors caste a magical spell, but it is time to make our way home. Fortunately, we find an elevator to take us down. We couldn’t have done the steps again. In the elevator, we meet some women who told us that there was also an elevator up. We must have missed it.

We headed for home and didn’t see a taxi. The streets of Florence are alive at night, especially as we pass the Plaza di Populo where we ate the nite before. Along the streets and walkways, there are jugglers, and fortunetellers. Cars and the noisy motor scooters are apparently forbidden. People selling jewelry, purses, works of art and reproductions have laid their goods out on blankets. We walked along dark streets of ancient cobbles. The buildings are solid and stone and loom above us. Every few blocks there are plazas, large and small. Every other block, there are monumental buildings: old churches, fortresses, and giant statures.

We passed closed shops all along the way. In one, we saw some interesting dishes in the window. Each dish had a picture of chicken, but these chickens weren’t white. One had the stripes of a tiger. Another had the spots of a leopard. A third had the stripes of a zebra. It was a nice image. I didn’t like it as well as the Botticelli’s, but those old paintings are all so familiar. These plates satisfied my simple and insatiable American desire for novelty.