Florence, Siena, and Pisa (July 2004)

I first visited Florence by myself in late July 1982, on the way back from an Italian trip I hadn't planned to make, but was talked into by a friend who met me in Geneva and offered a solution to my complaints about how boring it was. I had only a page or two torn out of his copy of Let's Go: Europe. In the day I was there, I walked all over the city, saw seven museums or sights that required admission fees (I know this because I have the tickets, though they don't say what I was admitted to), and had a mediocre pizza for lunch and a mediocre menu turistico for dinner with a lousy half-bottle of Chianti somewhere, all of which left me with a splitting headache. All I knew of art and churches, besides popular icons, was what I had picked up in a few days in Rome.

We visited Florence a couple of times on our 1995 fall tour of Tuscany. Though we had a car, I didn't dare drive anywhere near the city; we parked at small train stations and commuted in. This meant long walks pushing strollers through seedy train-station streets. While this time we had studied our art history and appreciated the Uffizi (after two hours waiting in line), our overwhelming impression was of ostensibly pedestrian areas choked with delivery vans and motorscooters, hordes of people, and a city that stubbornly refused to meet us halfway. When we went to a conference in Siena in 1996, we didn't bother to daytrip to Florence.

Somehow we got it into our heads that we should really give the city a chance; we would rent an apartment and stay for two weeks. The Internet made things a lot easier than in 1995; we had lots of choices, and found what appeared to be a nice apartment on the southern bank of the river Arno, quite close to the Ponte Vecchio and across from the Uffizi, with a view of the river and the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. We even managed to contact and deal with the Italian property owner instead of the middlemen offering it to us in English.

The apartment, in a building full of short-term rental apartments managed by the Gidec agency, was more expensive than any we had previously rented ($3300 US for two weeks, plus charges for utilities and cleaning totalling a little more than 250 euros) but it was also the nicest place we have ever rented. It was large, well-equipped (including air conditioning units in the living room and bedrooms, a major consideration after our suffering through heat waves in previous summers), with a nice view. The place looked better in person than in the descriptions and photos on the Web. That much money sunk into a hotel would have gotten us two double rooms in a modest hotel without views.

Our two weeks in Florence, with side trips to Pisa, Siena, and Lucca, changed our opinion of the city. It is quite highly touristed. Tour groups constantly flow and ebb around the Duomo, down the pedestrian via de Calzaiuoli, into the main square (Piazza della Signoria), and across the Ponte Vecchio towards the Pitti Palace. In addition to numerous stores and street kiosks, pavement vendors (most of them probably illegal) sell sunglasses, cheap posters, and stupid little gimmicky items. Why are there so many Asian women sitting in front of buckets of water, fishing out reeds and weaving little birds? Why are so many other hawkers demonstrating little remote-controlled cars that appear to be having epileptic fits, or offering to write one's name out in writing that looks vaguely Oriental, or insisting that their temporary tattoos will last for twenty-five days? Because enough tourists buy such things to make it worthwhile to have so many people offering them.

But despite this, the city grew on us. The food is good, if you take some care in finding it, and the sights are rewarding, if you don't try to "do" them. We didn't go see Michelangelo's David at the Accademia; we didn't go into the Palazzo Vecchio, and we spent almost no time in the Piazza della Signoria. I'm not going to claim that we found the "real" Florence, or that we know what it's like to live there; we barely left the historic centre, we speak only tourist Italian, we didn't have to deal with state bureaucracy. But we're stubborn people who don't make friends easily, so maybe Florence is a sort of kindred spirit.

The weather was in our favour; the week before we left, highs were in the range of 30-33 Celsius, but it was cooler (around 26) on the day we arrived, and after a couple of nights of using the air-conditioning, we didn't have to use it much, despite our tendency to close the windows to keep out mosquitoes. We had been expecting heat, traffic, and noise; there was some of each, but the traffic problems in the pedestrian areas were from people on foot, not from mopeds.

Instead of a chronological description of each day, I've prepared separate pages offering my opinions of sights we saw, restaurants we ate at, stores at which we bought things (mostly food and wine), and sources for gelato, one of the great delights of the city.