Single Shot

Next door to us is Piazza Santissima Annuziata.That piazza is the turf of older gypsy women. There are no gypsy men, no gypsy younger woman, just mature women. They are easy to recognize by the ankle-long velvet skirts they always wear.They spend most of the day begging, especially at the church door. Every night, they sleep on the loggia of the Innocenti on the same piazza, where they are protected from the rain. One thing we wonder about is their bedding. They have a lot of it, and what can they do with it in the daytime? Probably a charity lets them store it close by.

So far, I have not taken pictures of them.  However this morning I could not resist snapping this one who was begging at the church door  while chatting with a friend on her cellphone. A professional through and through.

Knobs

The last post was on doors, this one is on knobs to open these doors. You would not believe the diversity of door knobs there are in Florence. We walked for 2 hours one morning, and in these two hours I took pictures of 120 different styles of door knobs/handles including this majestic lion.

Portes cochères

One of the things I like best about Florence are these big doors that open to let a car get into a courtyard or a garage. Sometimes one of these will be left open, and you can see part of the courtyard. These courtyards run the gamut from a simple parking area to a magnificent garden.

Italian Odds & Ends

This is a short series of photos that do not fit in any specific post, but which I thought you might enjoy.
The first one is of a delivery truck bringing in bottles of Chianti, and picking up the empties. They must have a way of washing this type of bottle without having to redo their straw "jacket".

Two for the price of one

Auguri a tutti

Those who are not interested in gardening might despair of yet another post on gardens. At least it covers two of them in one post.

The first is the garden of the Strozzi Villa. It might have had a garden at one point, but now it  is mostly a steep hill covered with green vegetation and a  couple of buildings at the top. The steps taking you up the top are impressive. What you see below is only a fraction of them.

The English Cimetery

This is the graveyard where foreigners have traditionally been buried in Florence.  The diversity of monuments is amazing. The best is perhaps this one for the wife of the 19th century English poet, Walter Savage Landor, the one who wrote: "I warmed both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart."

We got a very funny explanation of this monument from the person in charge of opening the graveyard gate, a plump Anglican nun. I told her the woman looked very sad. "Well, not for her husband's death," she said. "She had thrown him out of the house and, as you will notice, she is buried at the opposite end of the graveyard from him and with her back turned to him."

Giardino della Gherardesca

Covering 4,5 hectares, this garden is one of the largest private gardens of Florence. Being private, it is not open to the public. Actually it is part of of the Four Seasons, a five star hotel. Without telling me, Lorne wrote to the hotel explaining that we knew the garden was not open to the public but asked if they could make an exception for two Canadian tourists? Their answer was that he was right, it was not open to the  public. However, if we could set a date, they would give us a time we would be welcome.

The Boboli Garden

We associate gardens with flowers, but it has not always been so. Before the nineteenth century, gardening was mostly about putting order in nature and interpreting that ordered nature according to classical notions of the ideal landscape. The Boboli garden is a very good example of this.

A parterre at the Boboli

San Leonardo

San Leonardo is a narrow, crooked street that snakes up a hill just outside the city.  You might not be impressed with its stone walls, sometimes leaning or even crumbling, through which you every now and then comes to a gate . Here is a typical view.

Terracotta Pots

The terracotta pot is is a quintessential element of Italian gardens. There were many of them in all the gardens we visit. The problem with terracotta is, of course, that a solid frost will break the pot. What was particularly interesting in the Giardino dei simplici was that you could see how these pots are maintained and repaired.

Giardino dei simplici, Firenze

Al ristorante

The Vegetariano is the oldest vegetarian restaurant in Florence. We were there last night and had a excellent meal, but it was an experience different from any restaurant experience we ever had.

Il Giardino dei Simplici

Last Saturday, we visited the Botanical Garden - il giardino dei simplici. The simplici, simples in English (or in French for that matter), are the medicinal plants that were considered effective on their own. They do not have to be mixed with others to form a compound. The use of that name for the garden and the reference to medicinal plants suggest how old this garden is. In fact it was established on December 1st, 1545.

Nowadays there is still a large section given over to medicinal and culinary plants, but ornamental plants are also prominent. There were not many blooms at this time of the year. The most prominent were some paperwhite daffodils, the kind we force indoor, but which here have been naturalized in the garden.

Minor Pleasures of Florence

There are a great many places to visit in Florence, but one of the nicest things is just walking around and noticing how people live. For instance, these three balconies covered by a single wisteria. It must be quite nice in spring when the long blooms hang down and in summer when the foliage provides shade.

More than we bargained for

There was a  free concert at the American Episcopalian church in Florence (festival of nine lessons and carols) . We decided to go, in part because the church is in an area of Florence we had not seen yet. The church is in an attractive building and the people, being for the most part Americans, are very welcoming (part of the money to build the church was given by J. P.Morgan).

The Episcopalian Church in Florence

La lettera

I had to mail a regular letter (a seed order for a seed exchange I belong to, which has to be sent by regular mail). To find a post office, I used an on-line service offered by the Italian postal system. You say where you are, and they tell you how to get to the closest post office by car or "a piedi". So far so good. But I did not have an envelope and was hoping you could get one, perhaps a pre-stamped one as such as they sell in Canadian post offices. We left "a piedi" after lunch and got there at 1:35. Unfortunately, post offices close at 1:30. That was yesterday, so that excursion had to be attempted again today. We were back at it this morning, this time trying the main post office.

Fiera ecologica

We woke up this holiday morning (Immacolata Concezione) and the square at the end of our street (SS Annunziatta) was transformed into an ecological fair where they sold all sorts of homemade products.

Florence by night

The downtown is as busy at night as it is in the day time. This is a long weekend in Italy and we have the impression that many of the tourists are Italians from other parts of the country who are here for the weekend. There are many families out late in the evening with children in tow. Children are  involved, even at night. There is a merry-go-round near the Duomo.

The Christmas lights are different on each street

A bit to the right, under the flags, you can see a copy of Michelangelo's David who does not seem to mind the cold (it was about +5C) when the picture was taken.

The all illuminated building below houses very upscale stores. If I remember well, on the left  is Gucchi and on the right Armani. The picture does not do these lights justice as it does not show the constant shimmering.

To end with, nativity scenes in a pastry shop.

Una passeggiata lungo l'Arno

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The Mercato Centrale

Here is the market with its Christmas decorations.

L'appartamento

The defining feature of our apartment has to be security. You would not break in easily. You first have to unlock the very heavy door to the street.

Once you are indoor, there is a metal grill, which fortunately is not kept locked.

It is pitch dark inside. There is a light, but it is on a timer. Since we are on the second floor (3rd floor on the North American system) you cannot tarry as you go up, or you find yourself in the dark. There is an elevator big enough for two thin persons. We usually walk up.
Once you get to our landing, you have another locked door.

 Once you have unlocked it, you find yourself in a small hall where you have the doors (plural) to the apartment. First a grill, and then a wooden door.

That wooden door might look simple enough, but in fact it is very heavy and has 8 (eight) steel bars that lock into the jam on each side. Here is a view of the middle bars.

Needless to say, we have quite a selection of keys to open all these.

The floor plan is rather strange. Since there are windows only on one side, there are light wells that do produce some light but mess up the space. As you come in there is a long corridor and the rooms are at the end of it.

The main room is the living room which has two couches facing each other and French doors that opens on the balcony. Notice the metal grill past the doors, with the big lock.

The balcony overlooks all the neighbouring gardens.

The living room also had a library (I think this is what sold that apartment to Lorne). Strangely, 80% of the books are in French, the others in Italian. There are also a few guide books to Florence left here by previous tenants.

I will finish the apartment tour in another post. Across the street from us, 30 feet from the front door, is the entrance to the university. The street is always very busy with students coming in and out.

 To end with, a suggestion for a Christmas gift for children which which seems to us very Italian - a little espresso set!!!

Getting There

The above picture does not look much like Florence, does it? For contrast's sake, I thought of showing what you saw from an upstairs window at our house in the Bruce, one week before we left for Florence on December 1st.

We had Air France tickets as they happened to be the cheapest when we bought them late last summer. As most of you must know, we usually go to Victoria, British Columbia, at this time of the year and fly West Jet. We realized there is as much difference between Air France and West Jet as there is between the weather in Florence and in the Bruce. Contrarily to West Jet, all is free on Air France (ear phones, films, etc...). Instead of getting a tiny bag of West Jet peanuts for a meal, with an economy seat on Air France, you are offered champagne as an aperitif, a selection of wine with your meal, and cognac or liqueur with your coffee! There is also a breakfast before you land.

We worried that because of the climate conference in Paris, there would be delays. However, all was fine even if the hour and a half we had in Paris to change flights to Milan was just enough, because we had to go through Customs and then walk what seemed like a mile-long corridor to get to another section of terminal 2 (and Lorne read there are 10 terminals!). Before leaving I had bought from the CAA a money belt that turned out to trigger every alarm in every airport. I certainly won't wear it on the return trip!

We thought the flight to Milan was also Air France, but it was Alitalia. It gave us our first taste of Italy. The stewards were older gentlemen with their hair impeccably groomed. They wore blue blasers with green silk ties held in place with an Alitalia gold pin. All Vittorio de Sica look-alikes, they were just like butlers in British TV series like Downton Abbey - extremely polite but, from their high station, looking down at us mere mortals.

Vitttorio de Sica

Once in Milan, finding the bus stop for the train station was very easy. That bus took us for about half an hour through very crowded streets each ending in a "round about". One building was covered with a century old wisteria that climbed to the top with branches at each floor. My Tai Chi friend, Marlene, had warned me about people who offer to help you buy a ticket from automatic machines and keep the change. That was useful information. As it turned out, there was also an employee of the train company whose job was to help tourists buy tickets, and he navigated us through the system, which is rather complex. The only problem was that instead of buying two tickets at one go, I twice bought one ticket which meant that Lorne and I were sitting at opposite ends of at least the same car. I asked a controller, a young man in his 20s, if we could change it. "E molto simplice", he said, just phone each other! Then he gave us a sensible Italian advice: just wait till the agent or conductor has gone through the car and then one of you change places! Which is what we did.

Statione Centrale, Milano

I had imagined the various situations we would be in and rehearsed what I would say in Italian. What  was a good idea however backfired. My sentences, carefully crafted at home before leaving, produced the impression that I spoke Italian very well. People answered me at full speed, and I had a hard time understanding. However we managed. In one occasion Lorne, who has no Italian, figured out what the person was saying when I did not. It had to do with the pin number for credit card.
The train from Milan to Florence was a "Frecciarossa". They are very fast (and priced accordingly).

A Frecciarossa

 Once in Florence, we were to phone the agency we rented the apartment from and someone from their office was to meet us at the apartment. Our phone did not work, we asked some carabinieri where we could find public phones (it turned out we were just in front of them). We had to buy something to get change to use a public phone. There were two of them, and neither worked. We went to a taxi stand outside the station and explained to the driver he had to phone for us before he drove us to the apartment. He tried to phone but told us the number was not in service!  Not a very reassuring comment. We decided to have him drive us to the agency's office where we found out that all was fine.

Santa Maria Novella station in Florence

We got back into our taxi to be driven to the apartment.  It took a good five minutes of driving to get  there. We realized we were probably being taken for a bit of a ride as we knew from studying the map ahead of time it was a five minute walk from the agency office. We did not care at that point, happy that all was well and we would be settled in a matter of hours.

Our street, Gino Capponi, with the Duomo in the background