Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 24-27: Florence, Siena, Lucca, and Pisa

I have, if the truth be told, had plenty of time to write over the past couple of weeks, and especially since arriving in Lindau yesterday, but, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I am quite good at distracting myself from my blog (which will not actually be a blog until I am back, as I do not have the energy to sort through my photos and put these letters online yet), and I have allowed it to become a sort of burden to me, something that I put off for no particular reason. I am going to try to catch up on it before leaving Lindau, as I do not see any reason not to; instead of working on it, I have often browsed the Internet, worked on future travel plans, and otherwise killed time.

I am afraid that I have to start his post with a reference to the previous one. I completely forgot to mention that Saint Peter’s Basilica (forgive my previous ire) seemed to me much less substantial than the cathedrals of Worms and Speyer, which, I suppose, struck me as more successful wholes. I also forgot to mention having cancelled my side-trip from Ljubljana to Trieste (en route to Pula), both to save money and to avoid taking another meaningless, one-day side-trip. I am increasingly learning that one day is not enough time to get a sense of any large city and that one does better to spend, say, a week in a place and gradually explore it than to spend a day or two in several places and be left with no real sense of any of them.

I will, again, rush through my notes. I got something of a sense of Umbria’s charm as I travelled north by train to Florence: it seems a little quieter and more rural than Italy’s more prominent tourist attractions; its hills and the towns and cypresses sitting atop them form a very pleasing landscape. The food in Florence is amazing. I noted the city’s layout, but I do not know why, and I noted that people seemed aware, in Florence, that traffic laws existed: they sometimes stopped their cars at pedestrian crosswalks and almost waited for one to finish crossing before gunning the engine. Everything here costs a lot of money—if one were to enter every church or museum that caught one’s interest, one could easily shell out forty Euros a day, even ignoring the costs of food, transportation, lodging, &c. (I made that number up; I mean simply that things are expensive.) Florence has public water fountains, like Rome, and it was full of vestiges of recent cultural development, unlike Rome, which had been degrading for 2000 years. Beyond its museums and art galleries, Florence’s churches itself seemed to me a sign of culture, as they were, in the middle ages, bastions of learning. In one church, one had to pay $1.50 to light a candle—I like how the church is always asking for more money—while in another, when someone went up to a particular icon, a nun came up and mimed that one had to pray to approach it. This I found especially interesting, and it reminded me of how women often throw on wraps or shawls before entering churches, only to take them off again as soon as they have stepped outside: gesture, and, more broadly, symbolism, is extremely important to us. I would like to support this statement with further evidence, but I am dead tired (an apt excuse, if I say so myself), and I cannot think of one beyond the use of multilingual signs (say, in English and Welsh) when hardly anybody actually needs them. Here is a better one: Ukraine recently celebrated VE Day on May 8th instead of May 9th and used some European symbol or other rather than the Russian symbol. This cannot have had any value except as a gesture, yet it was of the utmost importance to the country. Observing religious rites when visiting sites of religious significance is also meaningless in a sense (to pray before an icon and to stand before it are identical except as gestures), yet it has great importance to people who care.

The architecture of Florence is, of course, worth noting. The streets here are narrow, as in Palermo or Catania, but almost none of the buildings in the old town have balconies. Instead, they have thick wooden shutters, almost all of which are painted green, giving the old town a unity that is oddly mesmerizing. (I observed people’s leaning out of their shuttered windows and hollering down the street at times. The volume of verbiage that Italians produce is prodigious—I have seen bus drivers hold conversations with seeming strangers for over an hour straight.) Florence has public water fountains, like Rome, and yellow and ochre buildings, seemingly burnished by the sun, if I remember correctly. Every third building in Florence seems to be an ice cream shop, cafe, or delicatessen. Its sidewalks range from a meter wide, at their peak, to non-existent.

The inside of Florence’s cathedral blew me away, though I cannot, regrettably, remember why. I do remember its stained glass windows, the nicest, I believe, that I had seen in Italy at that point (and probably still the nicest, even now), and the queer green-and-white brickword that would characterize many of the cathedrals that I saw in Tuscany. While the cathedral is known principally for its dome (perhaps in part because of its being a seeming cognate with the Italian word for cathedral, “duomo”), the alternating green and white brick of its main corpus (I do not know the architectural name of it—sorry) struck me as much more distinctive. Its bells ring beautifully, which led me to note, somewhat enigmatically—for I noted their absence in the south of Italy—that church bells were the one thing that the Italians seemed to know how to build.

I apologize, again, to those of you who do not hate Italy.

I noted that the entrance to everything—every museum, every art gallery, and even many churches—cost money and that one could quickly go broke by spending five Euros here, ten there. The food in Florence is amazing—one could easily spend a week or two exploring the hills and the nearby towns, but the trip would be, admittedly, mostly gastronomical. The area outside of the old town is also neat—specifically, the riverbank. I went running along the Arno a couple of times and quite enjoyed the parks and statues outside of the old town. Part of Florence’s former town walls is preserved on a hill, at the top of which is a church with a plaza that affords one a decent view of the city. (On the day when I explored Florence the most, the best plaza for viewing the city was closed down, as there was going to be a fireworks display in the evening in honor of some saint important to the city. There was a massive soccer game and a parade that day. People seemed excited.) I noted someone’s yelling in a train station, which harkens back to my point about people’s holleringup and down the street. Italians, unlike, say, Russians, seem perfectly fine making tons of noise in public, and, while it annoys me that Muscovites mumble all of the time, as if fearful that their interlocutors might hear what they are saying, I can understand some of the cultural appeal of trying to moderate one’s noise levels.

I wish that I had more time, and a sharper memory, to describe my bus ride to Siena. It started out pleasantly: I bought some first-rate fruit (probably, grapes, cherries, and either peaches or nectarines, all of which are excellent in Florence) from a vendor whose store I had spotted the other day… and that was really the only thing that marked the start of my day. I remember the bus as being hot with the sort of amber heat of a sunlit vehicle on a summer day; I remember being seated close enough to the man beside me to sweat, being clad in shorts, through his lower pant leg. A beautiful woman seated across from me nodded off, her head lolling in every direction. The bus started off by taking me through parts of Florence that I had not yet explored by foot, past former guard towers and more museums. If churches and Roman ruins were endless in Rome, museums and statues are endless in Florence. I suppoes that I must have liked the landscapes on the way to Siena, as, on this trip, I felt a strange emotion that I could not immediately place. Partway through the bus ride, I smiled and realized that for the first time since I had arrived in Italy, I was content.

Siena itself was awesome. As soon as I got off of the bus there, I found a first-rate deli, where I got my lunch; I do not know if I have mentioned that Italians are into smoked meats, all manner of cheeses (perhaps harder and less exotic than those of France), and thick, crusty, substantial bread. I had a city map of Siena from someone in my hostel, which was a big help, as I could not otherwise have gotten one until I had already walked through much of the old town, which is composed entirely of the sun-baked, auburn buildings that populate Florence. It has parts of its town walls, a fortress, and a monastery just outside of the city center (none of which I had time to visit), which itself is dominated by the medieval tower that gives one a commanding view of the surrounding hills. Siena appears to have preserved its medieval form almost entirely, probably because it stopped growing at some point, when, as in the case of Lindau, where I am now staying, it became less relevant and money started to flow elsewhere. (More on this later.) One of its most impressive features was that its whole city center was a pedestrian-only zone, and, while there were nonetheless cars anywhere, the fact that a pedestrian zone had at least been attempted showed admirable sapience in a country so wanting in it.

I learned a great deal about Siena’s history by chance, having wandered into what looked like a museum to see if it was free. As it turned out, I had entered a bank, part of which was a museum of the history of banking in Siena, and, as the woman working there spoke Russian (i.e., was from Russia), I was able to learn that Siena had largely developed as a banking town, lacking industry for want a river. Siena was, like Bologna (as I would later learn), located on a crossroads between major cities (Florence and Rome, if my geography serves me right), and some powerful families settled there, I believe. It reached its peak in something like the thirteenth century and must have retained enough power not to sink into oblivion, as its buildings are in excellent shape.

I made another note about Italian food, as Tuscan food is fabulous. I tried spaghetti a la carbonara for the first time in Florence—it is a pasta dish with a sauce thickened, apparently, by eggs. I tried a kind of thick sliced meat, a sort of cross cut of a turkey cutlet stuffed with something greenish (spinach? Pesto? I could not tell). Tuscans are fond of fatty meat, which butchers will often trim a little when they are selling it, and of a minestrone dish called rebollita, which I did not get to try. While Italian food often gets passed off as pasta and pizza, I think that people do not realize the vastness of the variety of pasta dishes that are offered here—everything is more of less in the sauce, of which there appear to be scores, if not hundreds, of varieties. I do not recall trying any pastries in Florence, as I was probably trying to hold off on them, and cannot say much of anything new about Italian pastries. The gelato here is, when one is given a recommendation for a good place, otherworldly. I had held off on ice cream for quite some time before coming to Florence and had it twice in one day (on the one day on which I had it) to such good effect that I will have a hard time transitioning back to regular ice cream in the future.

I had too little time to see either Pisa or Lucca in much depth, and I again lamented having packed so many different cities into my itinerary: it was better, I decided, to see one or two places thoroughly than to barely get a glimpse of many; and I would have liked to skip Genoa, Turin, and Cinque Terre entirely if it had been easy to cancel my hostel and train reservations. Siena was, I noted, jam-packed with art galleries and museums, like Florence. I saw two young men proposition a girl out of the blue at the bus stop. I bumped into someone whom I had seen at another hostel, with whom I discussed the rise to prominence of this or that city, and I had an interesting time buying sunglasses, which I needed because of having lost my old pair. To make a long story short, I was torn between buying more expensive ones that had a sticker on them about their UVA and UVB protection and buying cheaper ones with no sticker, and I settled on the cheaper ones when a saleswoman explained that the expensive ones were “more special,” as evident from their price. (I later did some research and discovered that the cheaper ones had perfectly adequate UV protection.)

Perhaps my most memorable interaction in Florence was with the Bangladeshi owner of the fruit and vegetable market that I came to frequent. He had a work visa through 2025 and, when I asked him if he ever planned to retire, told me, “No, not tired—I’m still young” and explained that he often worked 14-hour days. On my last day in Florence, I dropped a ten-cent coin as I was paying him for my produce. We both heard it hit the floor, and I was about to give up on it when he told me to hang on a second. He grabbed a knife from the counter, got down on his hands and knees, hunted beneath a storage crate for it, and fished it out, refusing it when I tried to offer it to him as a tip. I would love to write much more about Florence and its surroundings, but, as I have too little time for each city, I have too little time for each letter home, and my memory, in any case, leaves much to be desired.