Day 3- I lived here once.

Day 3- Florence- 11 May

            The alarm went off at 8:30 this morning in Venice. Our room had no air conditioning so we slept with the window open; between the street noise and the general disorientation, I got about 3 hours of sleep. Needless to say, the alarm was not a welcome noise. I finally tore myself from bed, though, just in time to check out and catch a water bus to the train station. By just in time, I mean we got to the train about 5 minutes before it left the station.

            Mom and I sat across the aisle from each other, and Mom had the misfortune of sitting in front of a real chatter. You know when you get stuck on an airplane next to someone who just talks your ears off regardless of your noncommittal “mmhmms” and “yeahs”? Just like that, except she was talking to the other couple in their forced foursome, a French Canadian couple celebrating both of their 50^th birthdays. Apparently, Chatty Cathy lived in Italy for a year 20 some-odd years ago, and she was more than willing to let the French Canadian couple what she would and wouldn’t do, thoroughly dismantling the planned itinerary they had mentioned. Anyway, evidently she was able to tune it out as I looked across the aisle just in time to see her jaw drop in sleep. Likewise, my neck snapped up from overwhelming sleep multiple times… like when I would go to my grandmother’s country church when I was a child and my chin would gradually drop to my chest as the preacher drawned on and on to the elderly crowd.

            A little over two hours later, we arrived in Florence. We de-trained and hit the streets to find our hotel. Just two American girls lugging giant suitcases down the crowded streets of Florence, no big deal. After we checked in and freshened up—mainly complaining to one another about how our hair never looks right on vacation and how our eyes are puffy and raccoon-lke—we hit the streets again, this time unhindered by luggage.

            Our first stop was my old apartment in Florence. It was such a bizarre feeling to walk right up to it without having to consider at all where I was going. I was flooded with memories of waking up just two stories above where I stood today, eating gelato with Morgan and adamantly skipping her afternoon run. Maybe that’s why I gained ten pounds and she didn’t… hindsight is 20/20.

            After a montage of , “I ate lunch there everyday… I sat and sketched the Duomo from there” and the like, we headed to the Galleria del Accademia, the home of the David. There is lots of other artwork there as well, mainly paintings of the Madonna and Child that just made me angry at the Catholic Church. That’s righteous anger, though, right? But I digress… Michelangelo’s David is truly breathtaking. I know you think it won’t be a big deal because you’ve seen pictures of it all your life and it’s just some statue anyway… at least that’s what I thought. This thing is incredible; it’s larger than life and so perfectly detailed that you expect to see his diaphragm lift with breath at any moment. At some point, I made an aside to Mom about the intricate details of the statue down to the veins in David’s hands. Later, while we were admiring the rendering from the rear, Mom mentioned that David was supposed to be young and it didn’t make sense for him to have so many veins at the peak of his physical form. She continued on to say that David was much too young to have so many broken veins, “old granddaddy legs.” It was then that I realized she had thought my comment about the veins in his hands was in reference to the natural “veins” in the marble. The whole time we had been admiring Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Mom was disgusted by his placement of varicose veins all over the young man’s body. She was considerably relieved to find out otherwise, and Michelangelo’s good reputation in her mind was blessedly recovered.

            Tonight we’re having a small dinner on the roof terrace of our hotel and then going out for the main event: gelato. Ahhh, gelato… my blessing, my curse.