Florence!

Jeannie and I arrived in Florence, Italy yesterday after a very long and at times stressful journey. We are on our honeymoon: the wedding was this past Saturday in Washington, and we spent that evening and Sunday out on the Pacific coast in a beautiful inn/B&B Ocean Shores. The trip to Europe began Monday evening with a red-eye from Seattle to NYC, and that’s kind of where the troubles started. We actually arrived early, but they kept us out on the runway for close to two hours, waiting for a gate to open. Took a taxi to my brother’s apartment through very heavy traffic, and spent about four hours there before catching a taxi back to the airport, aware that there were strong thunderstorms and that JFK was delayed about an hour; our layover in Dublin was only going to be two. But our flight was listed as on-time, and we boarded, closed the doors … and found out that we were being held there. Two hours.

Our arrival in Dublin was really the highlight of the journey: coming down through the clouds, we broke into a view of the green patchwork fields of Ireland, misty after a morning’s rain and with the sun coming through in a few places.  But we landed twenty-five minutes before our flight to Rome was scheduled to take off. I bet you can’t guess the end to this anecdote! Two years ago I was delayed in Chicago by heavy storms, but my connection was also delayed, so I made it; this one had been caused in NY, not Dublin. We got off the plane and headed towards customs with about ten minutes to spare, certain we couldn’t make it, but decided it was worth trying. So we went through customs, through security, and literally ran through quite a few halls of the airport … and made the flight! They ended up waiting for a few other stragglers from our flight anyway, and told us that they thought the luggage would make it too.

It didn’t. About halfway through our flight, the stewardess told me that the bags from NY hadn’t made it, and that there was no second flight to Rome that day. It’s 3 pm here in Florence now, the next day, and we still haven’t heard anything about the luggage,  nor received it, and are keeping our fingers crossed for this evening or tomorrow. Worst case, we’re heading back to Rome on Tuesday and could get them at the airport then, but that’s an entire six days without most of what we packed: we’ve already re-purchased some essentials, but are holding out on a few others in hope we’ll get them back sooner than later. Prayers welcome! Once we got in to Rome yesterday and filed our missing luggage paperwork, we caught one train in to the main Rome train station Termini, then a surprisingly fast (1 hour 15!) train up to Florence; we had to stay awake to catch our stop and both of us kept drifting off anyway! But we got here, and found our B&B, and managed to stay awake until about 10 pm to beat the jetlag.

Now for the fun part! Since we’re staying literally one block from the Duomo, our first mission was  to walk out to the Piazza San Giovanni, and WOW that cathedral is amazing! Though it’s a centerpiece of Florentine lore and the city’s skyline, up close  in detail you can see the craft and aging and the places they’ve cleaned versus the ones they haven’t yet. Very very cool. We walked all the way around it, stopping in to little shops along the way – bookstores, leather shops, looking through windows at the gelato flavors – and taking pictures. We then headed south through the city and crossed the Ponte Vecchio into the Oltrarno for dinner at Gusto Pizza. We then wandered around a little as we headed back: down along the Arno’s north bank and up past the Uffizi gallery, through the Piazza della Signoria – where we stopped for my first Italian gelato! – and then meandered back to the B&B.

Today at breakfast, I had my first Italian coffee, a cappuccino J Our first destination for the morning was to find Edison Books, a four-floor bookstore in the Piazza della Repubblica, which is mostly in Italian, with an English section upstairs. We walked around a few outdoor markets and some leather shops, looking primarily for Italian-made journals for our writing and painting. Aiming to get advance tickets for the Uffizi, we changed our minds when the line looked several hours long, and instead walked along the river again down to the Basilica Santa Croce, which – along with the Biblioteca Nazionale (library) next door, was one of the major casualties of the 1966 flood in Florence. We went into the church, which is also an art gallery really, as well as the burial place for Galileo and Machiavelli, among others. They also have a museum there, which now features artwork that has been restored from the flood, including Cimabue’s famous Crossifiso, still not fully restored, though I don’t think the damage is repairable. Also, while walking along the river and looking south into the Oltrarno district across the Ponte Vecchio, I could see that the buildings there look newer than all the others: when the Germans retreated north through Florence in World War II, they blew several blocks to obstruct the bridge, rather than destroy the Vecchio (Hitler’s last minute order). Returning back to the B&B for an afternoon siesta – it’s in the mid 90s! – we stopped at an amazing leather book/journal shop and I found just the one I was looking for. We had lunch and found another bookstore, and now here we are, waiting out the heat. Pictures will come as soon as I have my suitcase with my computer cable in it!