La Vita Bellissima a Firenze
I changed the format of the blog to reflect the pace of life when I am experiencing one place, as opposed to seeing a new place every day like in Asia. Enjoy!
La mia famiglia: I au pair for a lovely Italian family that I found on Craigslist. Sabina is from Vicenza, a town about an hour outside of Venice that is famous for Palladino’s architecture. She has an impeccable sense of style and always looks so chic and put-together (as most Italian women do, I’ve noticed, no matter what their age). I feel quite schlumpy compared to her! Nino is from Palermo, the capital of Sicily, which is the southernmost region of Italy. Northern Italians and Southern Italians are quite different in dialect, traditions, food, you name it, but they have a happy union nevertheless. They met in Paris when they were working as lawyers at the same firm. He had a Fulbright and spent some time in the States in Utah and Davis, Calif. Nino now works for GE, and hence he works with Americans all day and doesn’t have much of an accent because of it. Sabina isn’t currently working. He travels often, specifically to London and Algeria and Houston, Texas, while I have been here. AMAZING: He gets the New Yorker delivered to their apartment in Florence. The family lived in Paris for 10 years but moved to Florence in September because of Nino’s job. They still have a flat in Paris and a small one in Venice that they rent out to vacationers in short-term stints. I get the sense that Sabina’s social life was much more active in Paris and that she gets a little lonesome here at times, especially with Nino traveling so much. She told me that Florence, while it calls itself a city, seems to her so quaint and petite compared to Paris. I sympathize – everything seems small compared to New York.
They have three kids: Francesco, 12, Margherita, 9, and Pietro, 7. They go to the only French school in Florence – where they also have classes in Italian – and they can very impressively switch back and forth between French and Italian when talking among themselves or with their friends from school. This leads to confusion because they sometimes forget and speak French to me, and I have to say, “In italiano, per favore! Non parlo francese.”
Francesco is on the quieter side; he's becoming a teenager. His pajamas tend to be too short for him, and my guess is he’s grown a few inches in the last year since he’s a little gangly and awkward in the way that he moves. He likes to sashay from room to room in the apartment in a giddy way and then he’ll either trip or stop suddenly and subsequently blush. He has dark wavy hair and a pale complexion with a few freckles, like his father. He knows the most English of them all, and we communicate fairly well. He is obedient on the whole, and often gets exasperated, with much eye-rolling, when Margherita and Pietro don’t listen to me or their parents (which happens a lot).
We’ve studied together for two of his English tests thus far – mostly on the simple past tense, was/were, contractions, and positives vs. negatives in the past (ex. I had vs. I did not have) – and he’s a bright kid but tends to say the first thing that comes to his mind rather than thinking about the question at hand. Francesco got 17/20 on the first test and 15/20 in the second. He seems happy with those results, but I’ve never really seen him too sad about anything. He’s incredibly easy-going and loves to play computer games. His favorite thing to read is this cartoon magazine called Topolini that kind of reminds me of the Disney Adventures magazine I used to buy at the grocery store. When it comes, he grabs it and is engrossed for hours. Once, when I picked him up from school, a bunch of girls were surrounding him in the courtyard squealing, “Francesco! Francesco!” and he blushed and scampered off towards me. I still tease him about how he’s popular with the ladies…but he sort of sighs and says “Nooooo.” It’s hilarious. And Sabina and I both tease him about an e-mail exchange with one his classmates, Diana, in which she asked him if he was funny naturally or if he practiced his jokes. He replied, “It’s natural. Any other questions?” He has tennis lessons twice a week and sleepover playdates fairly often.
Margherita is extremely outgoing and talkative. She’s very spritely and bouncy, always hopping or dancing or singing or acting or imitating someone she knows. She is fairer than Francesco and has a cute bob haircut. She prances or skips down the street and likes to sing, mostly French or Italian songs she learns in school. But she also knows some song about a caterpillar in English that she can’t be singing right because some of the lyrics are grammatically incorrect (“the colored caterpillar is a magic and a sight”). I tried to correct her on that front and she wouldn’t have it, adamant that she was singing it the way her teacher had taught her. She knows a little ditty in French that I gather is about two people getting married and divorced and so forth, and so I taught her, “X and Y, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, etc. She likes that a lot and has me sing it often while she supplies the pairs of names. It’s clear that she is very bright and she does her homework in no time at all. In the time that I’ve been here she has received a glowing report card. Her spoken English is limited, but she understands me for the most part when I talk and her responses have been improving since I’ve been here.
She’s been reading the Lemony Snicket books in French. She attends the most hardcore ballet school in Florence and has classes twice a week for a total of three hours. When I asked her in Italian if ballet was her passion, she sort of pursed her lips and then said, “No,” and ran off ahead of me. Sabina seems to be unhappy with how strict the school is and is pretty sure Marghe won’t go back next year…even though she apparently quite good at ballet. She often plays with this adorable six-year-old girl Francesca who lives upstairs (she has a cutie pie of a baby brother named Nico). And she has a lot of friends over and appears to be invited to a lot of birthday parties. One girl who I see both at the tennis club and at the ballet school is named Larissa, and apparently Margherita was invited to her house a few months back, and when Sabina went to pick her up it was from a massive McMansion with tons of priceless art and so forth and it turns out that Larissa’s last name is Pucci, as in the couture designer Pucci. Ah, Florence. The first time I met Larissa I thought she was only half Italian because her accent in English is so spot-on American, but it turns out she goes to the international school even though both her parents are Italian because it’s a posh thing to do. I keep waiting for Marghe to get invited back so that I can go pick her up, but it hasn’t happened yet.
For all of her maturity and composure, Marghe tends to whine a lot when she doesn’t get her way, and I can’t get a good handle on how to say “I won’t listen to you when you whine” in Italian, so I just have to try to placate her. One of our bonding things has been, when we’re walking home from ballet, always seeing the same old man playing the accordion through his lace-curtained ground floor window. We always wave and say, “Buona sera!” and smile at each other.
Pietro is the youngest and acts like it. He’s more than a little spacey and doesn’t always finish everything on his plate because he’s watching everything that’s going on, wide-eyed, and then Sabina or Nino has to shove forkfuls of pasta into his mouth. He is very cute and cuddly when he's in a good mood, however, and that’s when he’s not trying to horn in on the social doings (playdates that seem to happen four days a week) of his older siblings. He is into the computer games that Francesco plays though he’s not nearly as good. He also likes to play-fight and I spend a lot of time throwing him light punches and fending off his jabs as he shouts “pow pow pow pow pow” and hops around like a maniac.
His spring wardrobe, which we just changed into, includes this green striped pajama set with shorts and a shirt with a Peter Pan collar and cap sleeves. The getup makes him look like a little Easter Egg inmate. Recently he’s taken to spraying gel in his hair and then combing it carefully in the mirror into a do with a deep side part, and we all find this very funny. He’s so adorable, though, definitely the cutest of the children. He’s pretty lazy to the extent that he doesn’t like to do anything except play, but he only turned seven at the end of February so I’d say that’s just fine. Once he had to memorize an eight-line poem for school about a flea, and I had to stand behind him holding down his arms because all he would do is flutter around and do backflips off the couch.
It’s the hardest for me to bond with him because he knows the least English and doesn’t have much patience for my Italian. But we had a moment the other night. Sabina had gone out to a meeting and I was putting the kids to bed, and I asked Pietro if he wanted to read a book with me (Vuoi leggere un libro con me?). He said yes and picked out a book about dinosaurs that was actually quite thick and kind of academic. We snuggled under the covers, and at every turn of the page he gasped at some rendering or another of a dinosaur. I read the captions with my best Italian accent and we would have brief discussions about the ones he liked the most. Then he yawned, and I shut the book and kissed him on the head and shut off the light and he was asleep in two minutes. And that was our moment! It made me feel all warm and fuzzy.
Other fun times with the kids include just bicycling with Marghe or the boys to ballet or tennis – when I’m going along the Arno, Marghe in tow, I really do feel like I am in a movie. One Sunday afternoon, I took Marghe and Pietro to see a show called Gianburrasca at the tiny Teatro di Cestello near Santa Maria del Carmine. It was written hundreds of years ago, and it’s about this boy who is blunt and kind of annoying and acts out a lot at home and interrupts his older sisters and their marital plans, so he gets sent away to boarding school where he pretends to be a ghost speaking during a séance so he gets kicked out of there, too, and finally his family embraces him for who he is and he returns home. Very funny story, and the kids got a huge kick out of it.
Where we live: The Cusimanos and I live happily on Corso Italia, a street that runs parallel to the Arno but one block north. We are technically in the historical center – that is, within the old city walls, since we are east of Porta al Prato – but we are on the far western edge of it. We’re on the same street as the Teatro Communale, which is Florence’s biggest theater and the site of Italy’s biggest arts festival, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, each May. Half a block away our street ends, and then, across a busy thoroughfare, is Cascine Park, where the boys have tennis and everyone in Florence seems to go to bike and rollerblade. Our neighborhood is extremely residential and quiet compared to much of the city center. There’s one café and one restaurant and a travel agent and two small hotels on our block, and the rest is apartment buildings. We are also on the same street as the American consulate, which means they can always park their car on the block because access is limited AND we always have carabinieri hanging around 24/7 so it feels a bit safer at night (Florence is pretty sketchy after dark).
The first few floors of buildings in Florence (which are generally five stories or so, max – the Duomo’s dome, its campanile, and the Palazzo Vecchio’s belltower are the tallest things in the city and can be seen from almost anywhere) have extremely high ceilings. The front door to our building is this massive wooden arch-shaped structure. Erika said it well when she noted that it could fit a giant riding a stallion and wearing a very tall hat. Once you heave open the ginormous door you step into a little lobby with a big archway at the end through which you can walk to the courtyard and the garage where everyone keeps their bikes. To the right is a large stone staircase with a skylight at the top, and one flight up, there we are! Their entrance hall – which, like the whole first floor, has ceilings that must be 15 feet high -- has beautiful ceiling moldings and a large glass table that they use for dinner parties. Their kitchen, which I am in love with, is bright and air with floor-to-ceiling French doors and a narrow porch, and it has a large country-style chandelier and a wooden table with a marble top. Also on the first floor is the chic large living room, Margherita’s bedroom, the boys’ bedroom, and the parents’ bedroom. There are also FOUR bathrooms on the first floor. It’s wild.
In the kitchen there is a flight of stairs leading up to a low-ceilinged loft area that contains the playroom/home theater (that turns into a guest bedroom when people are over), the washing machine and intense ironing board used by dry cleaners, one of the storage areas, and my lovely spacious room and bathroom! My room is basically entirely furnished from IKEA (there is one a few km outside the city), and contains a lot of floor space surrounded by a little bed, a desk, a bookshelf, a little dresser, and a metal clothes rack with garment-bag type storage. Considering I arrived with a massive duffel bag and a stuffed camping backpack, the fact that everything fits took quite an effort on Margherita’s and my part. The whole upstairs, like I said, has very low ceilings, and I have bumped my head a few times even though I am short and hyper-aware of the situation. Alex, who came to visit the week after I arrived, hit his head more severely, seeing as how he’s 3/4 of a foot taller than me. But I love that I have my own space, and I have plenty of privacy, which is very nice. My window looks out onto the courtyard, where now that the weather is nice the kids ride their bikes and play ball and so forth.
The one minor setback to the living situation is that the Cusimanos have one computer, a Dell, in Sabina and Nino’s bedroom. It has a French keyboard, which makes it extraordinarily difficult to type anything with any speed (important things like the a, the m, and the period are out of place), and on top of that for some reason their computer won’t read my flash drive so I can’t transfer any documents. Luckily I found an pub near Piazza della Repubblica called The Old Stove that gives free internet, so when I am desperate to get a lot of e-mailing done at once and I’m not at work, I go there and sit at their outdoor tables and take advantage of the free WiFi with the other students. And sometimes I get a wireless signal sitting in a certain spot on the couch in the living room.
My internship (lo stage, in italiano!): I am an unpaid intern for the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Institute and Museum of the History of Science). The museum is incredibly cool. I fell in love with it when Ariane and I first visited it over spring break our sophomore year; the day Steve went to Siena. Its permanent exhibitions contain ancient astrolabes and other astronomical devices, giant gilded models of the universe and the planets (these are massive and incredibly cool), old maps, chemistry sets and barometers and thermometers, an apothecary’s tools, archaic midwives’ accoutrements and examples of birthing techniques, etc. The main draw, though, are the Galileo rooms which contain, among other things, his telescopes and the embalmed index finger of his right hand. I still haven’t figured out why it isn’t with the rest of him, but it’s cool nevertheless. The Institute part of it is basically the research arm. The foundation of their extensive library is the Medici’s large collection of ancient books, if that gives any indication how prestigious and in-depth their holdings are. They hold events and colloquiums and I believe they co-sponsor PhD programs. You can check out www.imss.fi.it for more information; the site has an English version.
The museum itself is located right on the Arno, just east of the Uffizi, in Piazza dei Giudici. The research library is on the third floor (fourth floor by American counting) and it has floor to ceiling windows that provide a stunning view from the Ponte Vecchio in the west all the way up to the Tuscan hillsides in the east. You can see the façade of San Miniate al Monte clearly up on its hillside and the whole scene, with the Arno in the foreground, is just beautiful.
As an intern, I have a lot of different responsibilities, from translating to researching mini-biographies on famous Italian scientists to administrative work in the research library to editing the English version of a catalog about a new exhibit on sundials that will be sold in the gift shop. The last thing is actually a rather large undertaking because the catalog is quite long and contains dense, technical academic articles in extremely stilted English. It is really like pulling teeth because some of the English is so awkwardly worded. I’m proofreading the catalog this week so that project is coming to a close, though I still feel as if the English doesn’t flow properly. But it’s hard, because these authors are professors and scholars and I don’t want their translated articles to deviate too much from their original prose. On the other hand, Italian and English have completely different ways of structuring complex sentences, using punctuation, and choosing vocabulary, and I feel that it requires more than a little finagling to make it coherent in English.
The director of the multimedia laboratory asked me to do a funny task. On the IMSS website there is a section called Scientific Itineraries in Tuscany, which basically outlines – using cool graphics and so forth – sites of scientific/historical importance in the area, ranging from museums to observatories or houses where scientists lived or fields in which an experiment was conducted. He said he wondered if there was a market for a little print version to some of these sites – like a history of science guide book to Tuscany. In my head, I was thinking wildly, “He wants me to do market research?!?! I am woefully underqualified to do that.” I did what any journalist does when faced with a topic they know nothing about…I sent e-mails to people I knew in publishing or travel-guide related work and then starting Googling with a vengeance. I came up with some BS report on European tourism that analyzed the demographic coming to Italy (students who don’t want to spend money, older people with money to burn) and got some advice via e-mail and presented the director of the multimedia laboratory with a bullet-pointed list of idea and options for how to proceed. I can only hope that was what he wanted…
An amusing little story is that I had to translate something for the IMSS website about a Galilean celebration that's happening in 2009. I chuckled to myself because its the 400th anniversary of his using a telescope and the museum is SHUTTING DOWN to prepare because its pretty much the biggest event in recent history. Oh, Hist and Sci. How I love thee.
I recently changed the structure of my internship a little bit because I felt like I was spending too much time inside the museum offices – or au pairing – and not enough time out on the streets of Florence, exploring or taking walks or just generally getting to know the city like someone who lived there. So I worked it out with my various bosses that I could essentially do most of my work translating and editing and researching remotely, via e-mail and the internet, so now I am faced with the challenge of structuring a much more flexible day. But I am thrilled to have the change to really shape my own schedule here, so we’ll see what happens. On my first day of “freedom,” I took in an exhibit at a small gallery on Via Cavour that took Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of various mechanical devices and made actual models out of them. It was kind of a dinky exhibit but I love da Vinci and it was cool to see the little sketches and then look at the life-size machines. So I feel as if I am making progress toward my goal of seeing more of Florence at a reasonable pace.
A day in the life: Before the structure of my internship changed, daily life settled into a routine. I would wake up, go to the gym, make myself oatmeal for breakfast, go to work by foot, bus, or bicycle from 10-4 (except on Mondays, when I only worked afternoons, and Fridays, when I didn’t work at all), go home, take the kids to whatever afterschool activities they have (Tuesday and Thursdays, tennis for the boys; Wednesday and Friday, ballet for Marghe; Thursday, catechism at church for Marghe), pick them up, take them back home, help Sabina with dinner a little bit and set the table, hang out with the kids or help them study English or do English homework, have a late-ish dinner with the family when Nino gets home, help put the kids to bed, chat with Nino and Sabina, then go upstairs to my room and do my own thing, maybe watch a Friends DVD or read and listen to music, and then call it an early night! On Fridays, I go grocery shopping with Sabina which is so much fun, and on weekends I have tried to either do day trips or see a new museum or sight (this has worked about 50 percent of the time), or I just take my time at the gym and read or relax in the beautiful apartment or perched on the wall lining the river.
Now that I don’t have to go into the museum during the day, my schedule is a lot more flexible, so what I try to do is go to the gym in the morning and eat breakfast and get myself ready before 10 a.m. so that I have the rest of the day to see one site or one neighborhood and do whatever work I’ve been e-mailed by the museum before the kids get home from school. They are on vacation for 10 days at the moment, so it’s really like being on my own here, which is fun although sometimes a little lonely. They return tonight, though!
Provo imparare italiano = I try to learn Italian: My Italian is getting so much better, but I really need to sit down and actually study my verbs and vocab, which are the two hardest things. Its also frustrating when I attempt to speak Italian at the train station or a tabaccheria and I get answered in English. Can’t they see I’m trying?! It must be my wretched accent, which I hear I’ll never lose. Florentines aren’t known for being overtly friendly, though, unlike the stereotypical effusive Italian from the south.
I am stuck in the typical rut of someone at an intermediate level in a language: I understand a lot more than I can express, and I am nervous about speaking. I mutter things in what I believe is perfect Italian as I walk down the street, and as soon as I have to talk to someone real, I freeze. But the key phrases I need for the Cusimanos I have down – go to bed, calm down, be careful, hurry up, we have to go, don’t touch that, no problem, don’t worry, etc. Sabina and Nino and oftentimes Francesco and Marghe are very patient when I ask them how to pronounce things and what different words mean. It’s a two-way street for sure, with the kids getting better at English and my attempting to improve my Italian.
The feel of Firenze: Walking around Florence makes me feel like I am in another era. It’s just so OLD (or at least well-restored/preserved) and pretty especially when it’s sunny. Actually, when it is cloudy or rainy it has this lovely bleakness about it because so many of the buildings are kind of austere and stone-like and medieval. We are in a valley and you can tell, especially when walking by the river near the apartment, because you rotate 90 degrees four times and in each direction there are these rolling green hills. Sometimes they will be shrouded in clouds while Florence is sunny, or vice versa. The view is empowering – from my little city I can see deep into the countryside.
Above all, I love the color palette – stone buildings and towers and church campaniles along with more modern (read: 18th century) facades of golden yellows and oranges and burnt sienna reds. (Digression: when I went to Siena on a day trip I learned THAT town is what the CRAYON color is named after. It’s apparently the color of the dirt under Il Campo, the main square. Wow.) All of those colors are contrasted against the deep greens of the cyprus trees on the hills that surround the city on all sides.
Cyprus trees, I have decided, are my favorite type of tree. They have a very distinctive oval shape and they look straight out of a Van Gogh painting and I am in love with them. When I am walking around Florence I have to remind myself to look up because so many of the buildings have beautiful moldings or windows or painted frescoes.
The city is so remarkably well preserved, and I know that’s partly because tourism is the main industry, but the building codes must be strict as hell because there are virtually no modern buildings at all in or near the city center. It serves to allow myself to fantasize about living in the Renaissance. But then the motorinos and the hordes of tourists who seem to travel in packs of 70 bring me back to reality. I’d like to walk around Florence’s center at 7 a.m., when no self-respecting Italian would be awake, but I haven’t been able to rouse myself that early either. Before I leave, though, I want to do it.
The gym: I joined a gym right called TimeOut, which is right across the river, near the big Esselunga grocery store that I love to go to because it makes me feel like I really live here. (Though many Italians, like Sabina, do their shopping at specialty shops, purchasing fruit and vegetables at the produce market on Tuesdays in Le Cascine, bread from the panerias, fish from the pescerias, and so forth. Anyway, back to the point.) I went gym-shopping in the first two weeks I was here, and found that of the two close to me on the north side of the river, one was a one-room shack with an elliptical and no treadmill, and the other was fancier and had about six treadmills but no elliptical. My standards were not sky-high here. So I wound up going with the better-equipped one across the river that had four treadmills and an elliptical.
None of them have mats for stretching or crunches or anything. Apparently, people don’t really do that here, and when I asked where their mats where in broken Italian, the membership lady pointed to some folded up yoga mats in a corner and just gestured to the weight room flood. “I can put it anywhere?” I said dubiously. She nodded. So after I run I just place the mat underneath a weight machine that nobody is using and try to do my sit-ups and stretching as inconspicuously as possible. It sort of works. I like that practically no one at the gym speaks English. It’s nice and authentic. And the lady behind the desk always says, “Ciao, Hana!” to me when I walk in. When I went away to Greece for two weeks, they were nice enough to freeze my membership so that I didn’t have to waste my money. Nice people.
Farmacia: One of the oddities of life here is the role of the farmacia, or pharmacy. The first week I got here I developed a weird purplish spot on my eye. It didn’t hurt or anything, but I thought I should have it checked out. Sabina recommended I go to the farmacia and ask whoever was there. It’s cool that the pharmacist has this power of diagnosis… it makes them much more of a key player in daily lives of Italians. Oh, the pharmacist asked me a few questions and determined I was fine and to come back if it didn’t go away in a week. Anti-climactic. But the farmacias provide a very cute, neighborhood-centric environment.
The Lupi family reunion: For one weekend, Sabina’s mom and dad and brother and nephew came from Vicenza, her other sister came from Padua, and her sister and her husband (who works for L’Oreal – boy, their family is well-dressed!) and their four kids came from Milan, and boy was it a full house! Sabina’s dad, Eugenio, arrived before everyone else, and we walked together to pick up Marghe from dance class. He speaks only a little English, so I was worried, but we managed to talk all the way to the dance school, mostly in Italian. So that was a blast. The reunion was so much fun, just exactly as warm and gregarious and busy and full of laughter as one would expect the reunion of an Italian family to be! The kids were thrilled to have their cousins around, and they kind of went wild. The closest thing we got to peace was watching a movie on Friday night while the adults were eating dinner – it’s a movie with Vin Diesel that I think is called “The Pacifier” in English but in Italian is called “Baby-sitter Tata.” Go figure. Then the next night the kids were running around as the adults had coffee in the dining room, and suddenly the evening morphed into the kids reciting poems in front of all the adults, who were seated on the couches, applauding heartily. I gave Sabina a puzzled look and she told me it is common in European schools for kids to have assignments where they have to memorize poems and recite them in from of the class. It was adorable!
Sabina’s birthday adventure: It was Sabina’s birthday, but nobody told me. The kids came home from school and I asked Marghe and Pietro if they wanted to ride their bikes in Le Cascine (the big park at the end of our block) while Francesco had his tennis lesson. Marghe earnestly told me that they couldn’t because they needed to make a cake for Sabina’s birthday. I asked if she needed anything from the supermarket, like candles or cake mix (hard to translate), because I could stop by after taking Francesco to tennis. She thought for a moment, and then wrote down on a post-it: “Comprare" (To Buy) and then “candles” and “cake mix.” Adorable. So I dropped off Francesco, went to the supermarket, and bought the necessary supplies. When I came back, I found that the kids had locked Sabina out of the kitchen. When they opened the door a crack to let me in, I saw that they had already mixed together some batter in a bowl and gotten a lot of it on themselves. I asked Marghe if she had used a ricetta – recipe. She shook her head and I tried not to laugh. I asked what she had put in it, and she said flour, sugar, yogurt, milk… and said something about watching her mom do it lots of times. So I said that we had better make the cake I bought, too, so we did, and put it in a cake pan. I had hoped they would forget about the other batter, sitting forlornly in the bowl, but they pulled out another cake pan, so I sighed and just put it in the oven with the other one. When it came out, at least it was solid. I sprinkled powdered sugar over the cakes and Marghe made designs on them with sprinkles (a heart and an S). Nino’s mom was visiting briefly from Sicily, so that made it even more festive. We set the table for dinner and Sabina was thrilled and we all had a lovely time! It turned out that the cake made according to no recipe by the nine-year-old and the six-year-old wasn't half bad. Not really sweet enough, but it resembled cake! I was impressed.
Home-cooked food: Room and board are provided as part of the au pair situation, and I am unbelievably lucky that Sabina is a fantastic cook. Every Sunday night she makes pizza from scratch. She buys fresh food, and likes to cook with produce that is in season. During spring in Tuscany, that means artichokes and zucchini and tomatoes. The day after I arrived, Sabina made pasta with squid, and I was dubious at first, but it was absolutely delicious. I can’t rave enough about Sabina’s cooking, so I’ll just run down the list of things she’s made while I’ve been here: artichoke risotto, asparagus risotto, octopus salad, gnocchi, pasta with zucchini sauce, pasta with red pepper sauce, lamb stew with rosemary, and ribollita (traditional Tuscan white bean stew). For dessert she often makes crème caramel or panna cotta, and once she made a yummy cake that was kind of like an ice cream cake with almonds inside. But my favorite dish she’s made was for a dinner party she and Nino hosted one Friday night – they were these little bowls lined with spaghetti that she made by hand and then filled with a little mixtures of peas and cheese, and then topped with another little layer of spaghetti and then baked in the oven. They were then baked in the oven and practically the best things ever.
The best part of the whole kitchen is that giant metal vat of olive oil that the Cusimanos get from this particular vendor in Sicily. They have a glass pitcher container that they use to store the olive oil they are using at present, and when it runs out they just dip it in the vat. It is outstanding. Another one of my favorite kitchen appliances is “the mocha” which is a little coffee pot with unscrewable parts. You put the water in the bottommost compartment, the coffee grounds in the next one, and then put it over a stove burner. The water turns to steam, comes up through the coffee grounds, and then liquefies into coffee in the topmost compartment. Simple. Brilliant. I am going to buy one before I leave.
People I love come to visit me: There have been many visits! Which has been great because I used to have a shortage of Florentine buddies (more on that later).
Alex Sommer (my best friend since nursery school) arrived just a week after I got to Florence for his spring break from Amherst. The events leading up to his arrival were the following: he was talking to my mom on AIM and he was saying that he had no plans for the vacation. She said, “Why don’t you go to Italy?” And he found a flight for 300something dollars, which is rather cheap, and the Cusimanos said it was all right, so he came! And it was so good to spend time with him, because since we’ve both been in college we haven’t been able to hang out as much as we’d like/as much as we did when we were kids.
He arrived on a Friday evening and, after dragging his stuff up to my room (including the one bag full of stuff Mom had sent to me, including my Friends DVDs and chocolate chips to make cookies and maple syrup and pancake mix), we immediately left to pick up Marghe from dance class. On bicycles. Poor Alex. I had gotten used to riding Sabina’s, which is a little big for me, but Nino’s bike is very unwieldy and has the racer-style handlebars so you have to hunch over. In any case, we got her back all in one piece. Then Nino arrives home and hands us concert tickets to an orchestra performance at the Teatro Comunale (the biggest theater in Florence that is literally on our block). So we go even though Alex is horribly jet-lagged, and really enjoy ourselves. It’s a performance of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino orchestra conducted by Alexander Vedernikov, and they first played a piece by Stravinsky then one by Rachmaninov. I liked one more and Alex liked the other more, but now I forget who liked what. For dinner Sabina made ribollita, a Tuscan specialty, but since she is from the north she enlisted the help of Maria Grazia, the lovely upstairs neighbor and mother of adorable Francesca and Nico.
The next morning, we arose early. Alex went for a run and I went to the gym. We met up and went to the grocery store to buy picnic provisions. After regrouping at home, we headed to Pisa by train. From the train station we took the local bus directly to Il Campo dei Miracoli (the field of miracles), which is where the leaning tower is, along with the main cathedral and baptistery. We felt kind of bad about missing the rest of Pisa, because Rick Steves had a good self-guided walk from the train station to Il Campo, but time was of the essence and we wanted to make sure we could get an appointment to go up the tower.
Once there, we make requisite fools of ourselves taking pictures of ourselves pretending to hold up the tower. This is more difficult than it sounds, and it requires some serious hand-eye coordination, as well as an ability to hold the camera straight so that the tower looks crooked. I am apparently incapable of the latter, as several of my pictures of Alex came out looking like the ground is slanted and the tower is vertical. Hilarity and much heckling ensued.
We climbed up the tower (the stairs were very slanted too, which was cool), and enjoyed the beautiful view from the top of not only the red rooftops of Pisa and the surrounding countryside but also of the nearby cathedral and baptistery that we were about to enter. In the baptistery, we were awed the clean lines, striped marble, and simple Romanesque arches, by the octagonal baptismal font and by the security guard’s demonstration of the acoustics. She sang three notes in succession that were an octave apart (I think), and because of the acoustics they all blended together in harmony. Very cool. We headed over to the cemetery, which I loved because of the beautiful arches surrounding a peaceful courtyard where we rested for a little while. We also saw some wonderful frescoes (explained in detail by Rick Steves) that had been basically ruined by WWII bombings and then restored. Then we went into the cathedral, enjoying more striped marble, the beautiful ceiling, and the elaborate altar made by one member of the Pisano family (I forget which). After that, we headed back to Florence for dinner. We then headed out on the town with – and this gets confusing – a friend of Alex’s roommate from Amherst who he met on the plane who was in Florence visiting his girlfriend who was studying abroad. In any case, we hit up a few student-friendly bars with them near San Marco and Santa Croce.
We day-tripped again the next day, this time to Siena, a quaint and beautiful Tuscan town about an hour and a half away from Florence by bus. We hit up the big sights – namely, il Campo (deemed by Rick Steves the best square in Italy) with the city hall, Palazzo Pubblico, and then we walked over to the Duomo and its campanile. Unfortunately, a new priest was getting ordained that day and so we were not allowed in. But we squeezed our way through the exit door to take a peek. We also learned that the horizontal stripes on the campanile narrow as they approach its top, making it appear taller. A-ha! I liked seeing an area off to the right of the Duomo where they were going to expand the cathedral but then never did, so it’s like seeing a framework or a skeleton that was never filled in.
We had the most fun wandering around the side streets and found an antiques market behind the Palazzo Pubblico that occurs on the last Sunday of every month. We also happened upon the little courtyard of building that with a little music shop gift shop in it (I think it is now used as a concert hall) that we both found enchanting. We bought a box of these DELICIOUS cookies, called ricciarelli (made from ground almonds, candied orange peel, and honey), a Sienese specialty, and devoured them before we even got back to the bus. We stopped at an Irish bar near the bus stop because we were hungry, and we each bought a drink so we could have access to the yummy aperitivo buffet.
On Monday, before I had to go in to my internship, we went to this amazing food fair called Taste where we tasted all of these fabulous Tuscan delicacies, including but not limited to proscuitto, salami, bread, 1200 kinds of olive oil, crostini spreads, jams, chocolate, cookies, cheese, coffee... YUM. It was funny to watch some buyers sample the products, especially the olive oil, because they sniff it and stick their finger into it and sip it as if it were wine or something. Highly amusing. Then while I worked at the museum he headed to some sights on his own.
That night, Jon Blazek happened to be in town with his parents, so we all went out for a wonderful dinner together at Trattoria Sostanza-Troia (see eating out section below) and then out for gelato and a nighttime walk through the Piazza della Signoria.
After our trip to Greece with Jon and Laura Amar-Dolan (an incredible trip to be recounted in great detail in another post), Erika came to Florence for a few days. When she got here, we headed to the Esselunga grocery store and picked up some supplies, including a colomba – traditional Florentine Easter cake -- much like the one I had brought to Greece that we devoured. We perched on the wall lining the Arno, talking and snacking. The first night she was here, we stayed at home baby-sitting the three Cusimanos and their two friends from Paris, Blanche and Elenore, who had come visiting with their mom, one of Sabina’s friends. The next day, we split up for awhile and met up near Piazza della Repubblica at The Old Stove, where I was using the free wireless. We took a leisurely walk back to the Cusimanos, where we decided to take the bikes out for a ride.
Erika took Sabina’s bike, and I raised the seat on Margherita’s little pink bike – and took off the little pennant that flies from a flagpole attached to the seat – so that I could handle riding it. We headed off to Le Cascine, the large park half a block away. We biked west, away from the city, along the main promenade with about half of the families in Florence. It seemed like the whole city was out bicycling or rollerblading. When we hit the western edge of the park and an adorable café after about 20 minutes, we weren’t sure what to do. Then we saw that other people were heading over a little wooden bridge with their bikes, so we followed and found ourselves on a path paralleling the Arno on the north side. So we kept biking west…and kept biking…and kept biking. We were getting into serious suburbs, and there weren’t that many houses around – just lovely green scenery and people’s houses and big gardens and the Arno. And some train tracks that seemed to be parallel to the rocky path we were on. We intended to cross over to the south side of the river, where we spotted some cute-looking churches and baby campaniles, but after passing two bridges we didn’t pass another one for a very long time. So we stopped, regrouped, took some pictures and decided to turn left at a bridge or right through a passageway under the train tracks, whichever came first. At one of our water breaks, Erika scouted ahead and noted that we were approaching a town. We figured we would go to the town and try to get a train back to the city since it was getting late and we didn’t want to bike back in the dark.
So we found ourselves in Signa, a small town about 7 km outside of Florence (thank you, Google Maps). On our way to the town center, we passed by a lake with rowboats and jet-skis for rent (“Cool!” we exclaimed), and a golf course/mini-golf course where there appeared to be a fair going on (“Look!” we exclaimed). Then we found ourselves in the middle of a mini amusement park with rides and midway games and food that was packed with Italian high school students who looked at us as if we were aliens from another planet, wheeling our bikes through. We later learned was called the “American Show.” We followed signs to the middle of town, where there was a big street fair set up. Erika bought a giant salty porchetta sandwich. I bought a shirt. I started a conversation with a lovely storeowner by saying “Dove siamo?” (Where are we?’) and then she proceeded to tell me where the train station was. After walking our bikes around the street fair for a bit, we hopped on and rode to the station, where we got two tickets back to Santa Maria Novella and took some pictures. It took about 15 minutes for the local train to get into the station, while it had taken about 2.25 hours to bike out of town… oh well. We had a “inventure,” as Erika’s cousins would say. When we returned, we had a wonderful night out at Il Latini (see eating out section).
On Monday night, we baby-sat again while the adults went out for dinner, and Lauren Schuker came over because she was in town with another Marshall Scholar, Patrick. We drank wine and chatted and ate the cookies and Erika and I had made with the five bambini earlier that evening – a hilarious ordeal in and of itself. It was great to catch up.
The Crimson reunion continued with Nathan Heller came in from Prague, where he is currently living working on his novel about recent college grads in heavily-expatriated cities. He spent the days touring, and on his first night we ate out at the amazing La Pentola d’Oro and the second night we had yummy Vivoli gelato – Nathan had chocolate flavored with hot peppers! – and then ate at a restaurant called Guelph-something on Via Pellicceria near Piazza della Repubblica (for more on these places, see eating out section). (The Guelphs were the faction that supported to pope in a fight against the Ghibellines who supported the Holy Roman Emperor.)
Eating out: I have had brilliant success eating out in restaurants when my friends have been in town. Alex and I ate at Trattoria 13 Gobbi on Via dell’ Porcellana and had delicious pasta, tripe (which was all right….), cheese, and appetizers. Though we did eye the bistecca alla fiorentina that the people next to us were having. The next night, Jon, his parents, Alex, and I ate at Trattoria Sostanza-Troia a few doors down and went crazy for their house wine, artichoke pie, chicken in butter sauce (which sounds boring but was incredible), and their bistecca alla fiorentina. When Erika visited, we went to Il Latini (seated next to a rather loud American woman and her 14-year-old granddaughter) and had, among other things, delicious ribollita, pasta with boar sauce (cinghiale, a Florentine specialty), and one of their cakes for dessert. They served us cantucci (biscotti) and some delicious wine (sweet, from muscat grapes, called Caudrina) and we got a tour of the kitchen because I told them in Italian that Erika was a cook.
Then, Steve told me that his friend from high school’s older brother had some friends who started an American-style brunch place in Florence, called Ari’s Diner. I hunted it down and befriended the two guys – Washington, D.C. natives, a few years older than me – who founded and run it. They serve delicious omelettes, pancakes, burgers, and muffins from 10-4, Wednesday through Sunday. They use the seafood branch of a restaurant called La Via dell’Acqua, while the rest of the restaurant is across the street and has delicious peppercorn steak.
When Nathan was here, we ate at La Pentola d’Oro on Via de’ Mezzo (near the synagogue), a restaurant that had been recommended to me by a colleague at the museum. The chef, Signore Alessi, devises dishes inspired by medieval and Renaissance cuisine in Tuscany, and when he opened in 1980, he was advised my Professore Galluzzi, the director of the history of science museum where I work! (I haven’t met him here yet, since he is a visiting scholar at Harvard this semester.) It was absolutely fantastic. We shared the house red wine, crostini, pasta in walnut sauce, tender oxtail with pear and peppercorns, and the Florentine torte. We ate the next night at Guelph-something (don't remember the name...), on Via de Pecceria near Piazza della Repubblica, and Nathan had delicious pasta with pesto sauce but I had mediocre pasta in “the Guelph style.” Ivona told me that I didn’t order right, though, so perhaps it would be better if we went back. Ivona and I have enjoyed coffee at Donnini, which in right on Piazza della Repubblica, BUT we saved money by not getting table service under the covered tent. Instead, we just ordered our own coffee straight from the bar and drank it to the smaller tables right outside the doorway to the restaurant.
Gelato is its own whole category. The family and I go to Gelateria la Carraia, which is where I see the most locals and the place with the cheapest gelato (just one euro for the smallest size). Vivoli, though, is a close second. I love the rice flavor and the pear and caramel and the mille fogli (thousand layers). And Festival del Gelato, near Piazza della Repubblica, has a lovely, large selection of flavors. Grom, on Via de’ Campanile, is a gourmet gelateria that was just written up in the New York Times because there’s a branch opening on the Upper West Side. It’s definitely yummy, but more expensive than the others. Ivona says the chain of shops called Very Good, is, actually, very good.
Friends in Florence: It’s been hard to meet people here. Not because there aren’t thousands of Americans, because there ARE, but they are either families or students studying abroad. I guess I should amend my statement and say it’s hard to meet people when you are a young person who is not part of a program. My one saving grace has been Ivona, my freshman roommate, who is living here while she is getting a masters in law at the European University Institute near Fiesole. We’ve had grabbed dinner and coffee on occasion, and I went with her and her Albanian boyfriend to his cousin’s place in Castellfiorentina (I think) for dinner one night. She makes me feel much more at home – and since her boyfriend and their circle of friends don’t speak English, it forces me to practice my Italian, which is wonderful. In addition, I have met some lovely people through some random messaging over the Italy network on Facebook. It turns out everyone I wound up meeting is connected to me through at least one Harvard person. Francesca, who went to UNC and is studying interior design, with whom I’ve gotten gelato and been to a concert; Jud, a Columbia alum who has been working here and rowed with a Harvard guy, and Marianna, from southern Connecticut, who knows three of my friends from school and is going to cooking school here. I plan to hang out with the owners of Ari’s Diner, so there’s more potential for friendship. And one of my funnier moments seeking companionship my own age came when I took Lauren’s recommendation and went to the beautiful synagogue on Friday night….leading me to recount…
The Chabad adventure: While Marghe was in dance on Friday evening, I took a walk around the Santa Croce neighborhood and up north of it to the synagogue. (There is a kosher vegetarian restaurant on the corner by the synagogue that I am dying to try but it was closed when I was on my walk.) I saw a sign on a nearby door saying that all are welcome to Friday night dinners at Chabad, so I walked over to the address listed and poked my head in. I met the Chabad rabbi setting up for dinner with his children, and he greeted me warmly, letting me know I was more than welcome for dinner and telling me when services were. Turns out I couldn’t attend them, because I would be in the process of taking Marghe home from dance, but I decided to try going to dinner. So I returned later that evening and sat down next to two students and started talking to them. Turns out that one of them was Becky Cohen, the younger sister of Miki, Harvard ’06, fellow hist and sci concentrator and FOP leader. The world is SO SMALL. We were sitting with Lorie, a Florida native studying art, and Jessica and Jason, who were in town briefly and had met at their hostel. Jessica is between jobs in New York and Jason is studying abroad in Vienna. The five of us had a wonderful time sharing stories and made plans to go out the next night for gelato and drinks (see going out section). Another funny tidbit is that there was a large group of tourists who were on some kind of tour of Jewish sites in Italy, and one of them called out to the kids table, “Where are you from?” and when Becky answered “Silver Spring, Maryland,” the whole group nearly had a conniption fit because it turns out like half the group was from the same suburb. It was hilarious.
In a related story, Becky and I decided to go to the synagogue’s Yom H’azmaut party, which was held in a basement room pretty late on a Monday night. We arrived at this shindig. A klezmer band was playing, and they had out a pretty nice spread of hummus and falafel and a yummy chocolate dessert and liquor. Everyone was sort of standing by the walls, chatting in small groups, and it had the awkwardly charged feel of a middle school dance. We stood around and talked to one of the girls she had befriended from going to synagogue every week, and after awhile, once the band left the stage and music from someone’s PowerBook took over, we began to dance in the silly, self-conscious that young people adopt when they want to goof off but everyone is watching. Then we got more into it as the music improved (mostly because I practically commandeered the iTunes from the self-appointed DJ, who was playing bad music) and wound up having a fun time. The evening ended after a fairly deep conversation with Gadi, the unofficial leader of the young people in the congregation. He told us about the rift between the rabbi at the synagogue and the Chabad rabbi, and about how there are less than 1,000 Jews in Florence and half of them are septa- or octogenarians, and how its unfortunate that that small community isn’t more cohesive. We learned that Israelis come to Florence to study medicine because it is cheaper and easier than attending a university at home. It was very enlightening.
Going out in Florence: I haven’t done this as much as I would like because I’ve been away a bunch and also just enjoyed leading a lowkey lifestyle. I also didn’t have friends to go out with until recently, so that should all be changing. With the Chabad crew, we went to Shot Bar, a place near the Duomo with inventively-named shots, and Be-Bop, which is on Via de’ Servi near the Duomo had has cover bands. We saw a band playing the hits of Lucio Battisti, a well-known Italian singer who sings one of my favorite Italian songs, called Mare Nero, or black sea. But Lorie says that when they do Beatles night, it can be hilarious because they sing the songs with thick Italian accents. Moyo is a bar near Santa Croce that I’ve heard from many people is one of the trendy places to go, but I haven’t been yet at night.
With Marianna, I sampled the delicious aperitivo buffet at Colle Bereto, near Palazzo Strozzi. If you arrive in the early evening, you pay 10 euro for a drink (I got a negroni sbagliato) and access to this great spread of food. It’s a good deal because then you don’t really have to eat/pay for dinner.
I bought a special pass for persons under 26 years of age to see six shows at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino – the oldest and most famous music festival in Italy – for 60 euro. So far, Francesca and I saw a conductor named Mariss Kansons with the Bayerischen Rundfunks symphony orchestra (they played pieces by Beethoven, Strauss, and Bartok, then two rousing encores, and the conductor took three bows at every possible point!) and a new opera version of Antigone where the composer came up at the end. I am going to see a ballet company (I got Marghe a ticket, too) and one of the Barenboim shows, and then another dance show when Laura Krug and my mom are here, and then another opera, La Dafne, with my mom.
Sight-seeing: Between the au-pair-ing, the internship and my various jaunts to Greece, Vienna, and Verona, I unfortunately haven’t had a ton of time to see the sights in Florence. That’s been changing since the structure of my internship changed, though, and I’ve been able to see a few things: an exhibit at Galleria Michaelangelo on Via Cavour where they built models of machines that Leonardo da Vinci had only sketched – including a self-propelling lamb-on-a-spit roaster!; an exhibit at Palazzo Strozzi called Cezanne a Frienze, about two art collectors (one of whom went to Harvard) based in Florence who amassed Cezanne’s work before he was widely recognized as a brilliant artist; and the Bargello, which is to sculpture what the Uffizi is to painting. I read an article in the IHT about a special exhibit they had there, and I wanted to see the permanent collection as well. Desderio da Settignano (Settignano being the town just outside Florence where he was born) was a sculptor who specialized in lively, realistic busts of children and young women as well as stone reliefs carved with a light touch. Many of his works have been attributed incorrectly to Donatello, and because of that he hasn’t gotten the recognition he deserved. So this exhibit brought together a bunch of his works from all over the world and was very cool. The rest of the museum was awesome, too, and it had some other Davids, by Verrochio and Donatello, to contrast with THE David in the Accademia. It also had some earlier Michaelangelos and an allegorical sculpture of a brutish woman (Florence) conquering a man in chains (Pisa). What I liked most about seeing exhibits and the Palazzo Strozzi and the Bargello is that the venues are sights in and of themselves. The former being a typical Renaissance town house of a noble family, and the later being the former town hall-turned-prison. Both have lovely courtyards, and in the Bargello I sat in awe of all the carved coats-of-arms on the walls. One weekend, I also went to I Love Artigianato, a handicraft fair at Fortezza da Basso where I browsed the booths and saw demonstrations.
Shopping: While window-shopping here is pretty much what I can afford, I did spring for some gorgeous engraved stationery from Il Parione (on Via del Parione), pretty much my favorite store ever. I love paper goods, and Florence is famous for them.
posted by HRA @ 8:39 AM
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