April 12: Venezia

We woke up to rain again, girded ourselves for a moist day, went downstairs for breakfast.  Our hotel manager has a flair for the dramatic.  I'm not sure what the music blasting was -- Judy immediately envisioned Faust, I conjured the beginning of Holst's the Planets -- but it was pretty intense for 7:55 in the morning.  But the breakfast was really good... fresh croissants (plain, apricot or chocolate-filled), rolls, yogurt, cereal, ham, prosciutto, red orange juice, and great Italian coffee.  Probably more, but that's what struck me.

We left breakfast and... the sun was almost peaking thru.  We got on the vaporetto (the water shuttle between the many islands of Venice) from the terminal about 3 blocks from our hotel and... there were patches of blue!  We reached Piazza San Marco and... the sky was blue!  And an hour later, there wasn't a cloud in the sky!!!

And so the rest of the day went. 

Everywhere we've been, Judy has been sad when we left.  My stock line is, "but maybe the next place will be even more amazing than this one!" And sometimes I have believed it.  And usually, it has been true.  Go figure.

But Venice saw my bet and raised me big-time.  This day was the best day of our entire trip.  And we have had some pretty incredible days.

We did not plan anything for Venice before we got to Florence.  Liz and Judy booked the room while we were there, and through an uncanny and almost eerie genius that has not failed us yet, they found an incredibly reasonable quad room at the Hotel Cristalle, just a couple of blocks from the ferry to Old Venice.  It is a great hotel, and I will stay here again if I ever come back.

And then Liz found a very reasonable tour of Venice that starts with a foot tour in the morning, and a boat tour along the Grand Canal at 5:20.  She booked it the morning we left Florence.

The day was absolutely magical.  Piazza San Marcos (St. Mark's Square) looked pretty good from the ferry in the rain, but it is absolutely breath-taking it the morning light of a cloudless sky.  We met our tourguide at 11:00 and she took us through the history of the area, and then through the maze of back alleys of Venice -- with not a little editorializing -- before depositing us near the Rialto Bridge, the oldest bridge spanning the Grand Canal.

During the tour, she had pointed to some gondolas along Santa Maria Formosa Campo, suggesting that a canal tour might be a lot more fun and less commercial back in here.  So we found our way back to Sant Maria Formosa, and found the gondolas... and found that they had gone to lunch.  And would be back around 2:00.  Or so.  So we parked at a cafe near the gondola, got a carafe of wine... and waited... and waited... 

Around 2:30 the guy showed up and we quickly negotiated a ride, and what a ride it was!  He sang old Italian songs, he whistled, he talked up the other gondoliers we passed.  The view from a gondola is very different from that on the street, and you get an increase appreciation for the tenuous hold land has on this place. 

At 5:20, we met for our boat tour of the Grand Canal on a water taxi, beautiful wooden boats that hold about a dozen at max.  Our guide was actually a young American who had attended NYU and studied in Rome and Florence before discovering Venice and decided to stay "for awhile."  That was 10 years ago.  It was a great tour.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on that.  I'm just going to post some pics, some from the tour, and some after we stuck around afterward.  We took the vaporettos around the Grand Canal after some dinner north of the Rialto Bridge and ended the evening back in Piazza San Marcos, leaving for Lido around 10:30 PM.  Enjoy!

April 11: on the road to Lido and Venice

We left Florence realizing that we needed a lot more time here, but at least with some appreciation of how much time that would require.

Next time.  After I get out of debtor prison.

We woke to a drizzle.  Packed up, and the rest headed out in search of sustanance while I guarded the luggage and retrieved the car, which miraculously appeared from God knows where. 

Our escape from Florence was far less dramatic than our seemingly endless search for our hotel upon arrival.  We now have a running joke, taken from Chevy Chase in the movie European Vacation, in which he can't get out of a loop around Parliament and Big Ben.  "LOOK KIDS!! PARLIAMENT AND BIG BEN!!" as with each circuit he gets more maniacal.  I have actually never seen the movie, but Judy and Liz were teasing me with that as we arrived.  It is a lot funnier now.  Not so much on our third circuit around the train stazionne a couple of days ago.

So we left in the rain, drove through the rain, arrived in the rain, took the ferry from the mainland to Lido in the rain, looked in vain for the hotel in the wrong place based on the wrong directions in the rain, and finally found the hotel in an incredibly obvious place.  In the rain.  Unloaded the car in the rain, checked in in the rain, and got into our room.  And the rain stopped.  Then we went out looking for food.  The restaurant that our hotel desk clerk sent us to turned out to not be open, but we found something kind of OK and got a good walk around Lido.
Lido is the buffer between old Venice and the Adriatic.  It is a narrow strip of land and is (I think) the only one of the 130-something islands of Venice that allows cars.  For a price. The ferry to Lido charges per car and per person, and a car with 4 is 50 Euro each way.  In actuality, it wasn't a bad deal.  Parking at the terminal is 35 Euro, and you have to schlep a ton of bags (in our case) on various  boats, buses, etc to your hotel. 

Our hotel manager was a sweet guy, and he told me about a place a couple of blocks away where I could park for free.  Score!  Anyway, we were able to unload at the front door, park, and not worry about the car (or its bills) for the rest of our time in Venice.

So we ate, had some more gelato (which is uniformly pretty amazing), went to bed, and hoped for the best.

April 10: a better day in Florence

The next morning was much more rewarding. During our bus ride I’d remembered driving by the Basilica di Santa Croce and suggested we walk down there. Again, we traversed the area surrounding the Duomo and dropped down to the Palazzo Vecchio on the Piazza della Signoria. In my plan, that had just been a route that would lead us by some other “stuff” on the way to the Basilica di Santa Croce, but it was pretty much the find of the day in my book. 

There is an amazing sculpture gallery there, and I've got some of the stuff below:

Perseus slays Medusa

Hercules and the Centaur

Rape of the Sabine Women (I think)

In the afternoon/evening, we took a tour of the Chianti region, which lies in the Florence and Sienna regions and was a point of contention between the two city states.  We toured a wonderful vineyard, Castello il Palagio. 

The site was originally a Chianti castle built in the 1200s. In the 1800s (I think), it was converted into a vintnery. It turns out that the dungeon was the perfect temperature for storing wine casks as they age.  And that cellar is quite impressive, particularly the largest wine barrels. 

In the picture below, the "72" refers to the number of hundreds of liters that the barrel held (it has been retired, after about 20 years of service). The smaller barrels that we typically see last 3-4 years.

After the tour came the wine tasting:  a Chianti Classico and two Chianti Classico Reserves (2004 and 2007).  If you buy a Chianti, look for the "classico" label.  They have very strict requirements, including that at least 80% of the grapes used are Sangiovese, and 100% are grown in the Chianti region.  All Classico wines are aged in barrels for 9+ months.  All Reserve are aged over 2 years in the barrel, and at least another year in the bottle.  They are quite a bit smoother, as well as more expensive... although the prices are really quite good... certainly, less than a comparable Virginia wine.

The "tasting" was really a bunch of bottles with assorted cheeses, bruschetta with extra virgin olive oil, goat cheese with sweet hot pepper jelly, various salamis, breads, and crackers -- all produced on premises.

We officially finished with Vin Santo (literally, "holy wine") and biscotti.  Vin Santo is a sweet digestif dessert wine.  Vin Santo is made from grapes that are left to dessicate, concentrating the sugars and sweetness.  My memory is that at this vineyard, the grapes are left to dry from harvest until about March -- they are basically raisins -- before fermentation.  The result is a very strong dessert wine that is incredible with biscotti.

That was the official end.  We also had the opportunity to try their grappa.  For the uninitiated, grappa is produced by distilling the leftover skin, stems, pulp and seeds of the grapes.  It is 40%+ alcohol.  Imagine a fine Scotch... except not fine.  You have grappa.  Sorry, my opinion.

Anyway, by the time we left, everyone was in fine spirits indeed.  Our next stop was Greve, a medieval Chianti town whose favorite son is Giovanni da Verrazanno.  We had a number of Long Islanders in our group.  They were thrilled.

We toured another medieval city whose name escapes me, but it is where we had an authentic Tuscan dinner at La Toppa.  We began with more wine and some good Tuscan bread and extra virgin olive oil, followed by primi piatti pastas and secundi piatti of pork and yummy Italian sausages, finishing with tiramisu.  Then back to Hotel Stefani.

A couple of comments about our guide, a very slight young woman.  She was very efficient, and would have made a great preschool teacher or crossing guard, both skills needed to guide American tourists, even in the absence of grappa.  She also had a couple of really great lines.

On the drive to Castillo il Pallagio, she was explaining to us the Italian concept of wine and its role in life.  It went something like this (abridged):

"In Italy, we do not use wine to... eh?.... get drunk.   If you want to get drunk, you use ... mmm... beer or tequila or something else.  Or you drink French wine, eh?  But never Italian."

"Wine should only be drunk sitting down at a table, with family, over food, with time to talk and enjoy.  You can drink beer or other alchohol on the street -- there are no laws -- but not wine, eh?  And never alone.  Only people with problems drink wine alone.  Or tourists.  Or tourists with problems."


I need to say something about our bus driver, Massimo.  He was a large man with a Fu Manchu mustache and small goatee.  And his phone ringtone was "Sweet Home Alabama."  I liked him immediately.

He was also the most amazing driver ever.  As we were pulling into Florence, we came to a turn where two cars were parked illegally, one at the left point of the turn, and the other in the tail right of it.  Italian roads are not big.  Our bus was.  Very.  Massimo executed a turn -- very slowly -- in which the front of  the bus cleared the front and rear cars by not more than 2 inches.  I am not kidding.  We were all watching.  As he cleared the corner, the entire bus erupted in applause.  He stopped, put his head down on the steering wheel, and went "WHEW!"

April 9: On the road to Firenza (Florence)

We had no problem getting up, fed and packed before Emanuele came over to collect the last (extra) day’s lodging along with the Italian cell phone he lent us.  We also left some money to contribute to the flood recovery effort and asked him to make sure it got to the right place.  Then got on the road again.

I am starting to feel like an Italian driver.  No line of cars on my tail anymore, and I’m pushing that little Toyota Yaris in front of me who’s slowing up too much in those hairpin turns.

Wuss!

The road to Florence is great.  Autostrada all the way, first A12 along the coast, then cutting in on A11.  The problem is when A11 ends. 

In fairness to us, we did not have a city map.  We did have a couple maps – from the hotel website and from Mapquest – showing the neighborhood.  It’s just that none of the maps included the same roads, even though they purported to be of the same place.

We found the train station pretty quickly and knew that the hotel was supposed to be within 500 meters.  You’d think that would be enough.  This is the heart of old Firenze, though, in the heart of the tourist district.  What look like roads on maps turn into tourist walking plazas.  Or become one way.  The wrong way. 

On our third pass by the train station, we bore left and found the street that runs into ours.  And then found ours.  We wept for joy.

Our hotel was… confusing.  There are two hotel front desks with different names on the same floor of the same building, right next to each other.  Neither has the name of the hotel that we booked.  But one has a sign saying to check into the hotel that we did book.  Which is immediately above the other front desk office.  The room was a “quad,” meaning a very saggy double bed for me and Judy and a couple singles for Aaron and Liz, respectively.  We were in an old building in a truly prime location on Via Fiume, right at the Piazza della Stazione, two blocks due north of the Basilica di Santa Maria Novella and about 3 blocks northwest of the Basilica di San Lorenzo.  The massive Cathedrale di Santa Maria del Flore (the Duomo) is just another two blocks beyond the Basilica de San Lorenzo.

The elevator in our hotel:  Hotel Stefania (or pick a name).  We thought it was cool.

When we checked in, a service came and took our car to God knows where, and unfortunately we left the Lonely Planet in the back seat.  So we went to the information center – closed for the day-after-Easter holiday – and then wandered down to the Duomo and kind of around the area, but without any clear purpose.  Eventually we bought a city sightseeing tour, which ended up being a bad deal since we were so late in the day and got very little use out of it… but at least we were able to kind of orient ourselves.   Afterwards, I wasn’t feeling so great so came back to the room to catch up with this blog while the others went out for food.

Duomo

Duomo - dada-esque panorama.  Don't know what happened, but I kind of like it.

Duomo detail

Duomo detail

David, overlooking Florence