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