Whittling down in Florence

I realized early in our planning about Italy that we would face a welcome problem: too much. In our travels these recent years, we've spent a long time in places (Russia, Hungary), and had plenty of time to get to know them. Or we've been to places, like Croatia or Montenegro, where choosing what to do was a process of searching out and adding up. Italy, on the other hand, is a merciless process of whittling down. This is how we managed to leave town without seeing Michelangelo's "David" at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze.

We weren't there nearly long enough. The first things that struck me, walking away from the train station to find our hotel as it began to get dark, was that Florence has a much more pronounced bustle. If Venice is about elegant decay, Florence seems to be about chaotic improvisation. There were more crowds — helped by the seriously narrow streets — more filth, more noise, more smells. There was traffic everywhere crawling along, and a jumble of languages in the streets.

It seemed that every second building held a hotel of one sort or another. The abundance of lower-end options is staggering. Our hotel, I imagine, wasn't much different than many. It was owned by a very friendly fellow, who had the charming quirk of not letting his poor English get in the way of an earnest effort to conduct a meaningful and helpful conversation. Our room was absurd enough to be charming. For many years, a key part of the American in Europe experience was enduring strange hotel rooms, with their weird bathroom fixtures and aggressively lived-in vibe. So our place was positively retro. The furniture was mismatched, the bathroom was so small I couldn't fit into it if I squared my shoulders, and it had a small balcony that faced onto the courtyard of an Asian restaurant, so the smell of cooking oil would frequently waft up whenever we opened the door. Perhaps the strangest furnishing was an enormous, brand new, LCD screen television which took up one of the walls. I had no idea how to turn it on, and when I asked the owner, neither did he. There was a constant sound of running water, and our fellow guests were a rotating cast of working-class Germans, backpacking Scandos, and for a few days, a ton of Asian tourists. But the place was affordable, right in the heart of the San Marco neighborhood, and nothing I've said should be construed as complaining.

The first morning we began with that orientation shot, and walked down Via San Gallo to the Duomo. Nothing really prepares you for the size of this thing — you just never see an edifice like that, anywhere, let alone with the explosion of colors that you can know about but can't anticipate. Though the inside is somewhat overwhelming, we spent a good long time just walking around it. I think it must be clear by now that in Italy, I did a lot of staring.

Most of our days were a blur of holy spaces, as we spent a long time at San Marco, and Santa Croce, and Santa Maria Novella. We took the bus up to Piazzale Michelangelo and watched a sunset, we took pictures from the Ponte Vecchio, we spent a full day at the Uffizi (after having to buy scalped tickets because I didn't have the forethought to order ahead).

Our five-year old daughter kept her spirits up well, thanks in large part to a treasure-hunt style activity book my wife had the genius to buy right off the bat. I often wonder what is going through her mind when we take her places — in moments of frustration I'll point out to her that I didn't even have a passport until I graduated from college, but that's lost on her. We faced a few foreseeable problems — magnificent Renaissance churches are only so exciting — and some unforeseen. On our first morning, she lost a little plastic dog toy when she dropped it down into the grate of the Baptistery. Even though she only got it the night before at McDonalds, she was inconsolable for a few minutes. The pain vanished later on when we bought her a Pinnochio puppet, which was our constant companion for the rest of the trip.

In general, I think Mila enjoyed Italy because they truly love kids. In Eastern Europe, people in public have a fondness for children, but it comes with a hearty dose of contempt for their parents who are doing something wrong. Italians seem to take real, unabashed joy in children. I think every place we entered we were greeted with, "Ciao, bellissimma!" or "Ciao, Princessa!" Mila collected a number of freebies along the way — her favorite by far was when she insisted into going into a biker shop, and the scruffy, black leather-wearing shopkeeper gave her a Harley-Davidson keychain.