In Los Angeles, Enzo is bathed in the bright light. The follicles on his black hat look like the fuzzy side of Velcro. Tiny nylon loops shine in the sun. There is a metaphor here: how the loops have no attendant sheet of tiny plastic hooks anywhere in the world. He wears a black hoodie and black Adidas pants to match. We’re in the backyard, which is really just concrete. He’s called us to a meeting. The flowers spilling from the vines fall onto our small crimson table—pink over red that will stain and leak their sweet nectar which surely will attract another nest of black widows that I’ll need to investigate and remove in a fit of brutality before we take in visitors again. Enzo is talking about fighting the landlords with bureaucracy. The lawyers are on his side.
He seems to have had too many espressos and has been agonizing over this for months—they’re trying to turn the music studio he built into a third unit. We are listening and nodding.
“Yes, we also don’t want a third neighbor,” I say.“Yes, yes, and I like you guys,” he says.
“There’s a mutual respect.”
He gives me a Miles Davis baseball cap that Miles Davis’ son, Erin Davis, gifted to him. They play guitar together. I will wear it every day during our month in Italy. Enzo is known to noodle late into the night—scale after scale. We say nothing because we can tell the amp has been turned to two or three and he is very good. My wife, Chelsea Snow and I are leaving for our honeymoon later this evening. We remind Enzo. He tells us to visit a few restaurants in his hometown of Venice. He says he’s had a rough couple of years. We promise to send a picture or two and say goodbye.
LAX
Our Uber driver tells us she is also heading to Europe later this summer on a long cruise with her sister. She is exceedingly kind as she slowly bumper-boats us to our terminal at LAX.
We eat nachos in the terminal and suspect the cheese is made of cashews, but there is no drive to find the answer. I drink what will be my last hoppy California beer for a month, and feel myself care a little bit less about everything for about an hour until my head starts to hurt again.
SWISS AIR
On the plane, a family with iPads and smartphones spilling rainbows of light over their sleeping faces rock and kick their seats back into our knees. It is far too early for it to be anything other than a faux pax for them to recline, but they do it anyway. Even their mother thrashes her huge blonde hair backward over the seat like they are the only family unit in a world without pattern or dimension—only them and their needs and their egos pushing out into nothing as if everyone else were built to only acquiesce or get bowled over. One of the kids is watching old Disney Channel sitcoms at full volume.
ZURICH
At our transfer in Zurich, everything is a little too neat. The countryside is painted with organized rectangles of yellow and green. The hay rolled up in packed cylinders is stacked next to dirt roads that connect the pale red clay roofs. Everything—even the trees look made of Lego. I imagine the pieces snapping perfectly into place with a satisfying click. In the airport, we read the signs and mock their accents. Every hall, escalator, and metal path has an attendant green and red light. Despite the hyper-structured environs we nearly die trying to escape an escalator. An American says something stupid and rude.
One of the food stalls is labeled “Asia.” Large, uniform bell peppers sit in baskets next to similarly piled, and similarly uniform broccoli and mushrooms—like a banquet for a knight’s feast. A lady at the stall draws smiley faces on eggs before placing them back in the jar. We eat pretzels larger than our faces. We are becoming tourists.
On very little sleep, we fill our water bottles in the bathroom because Switzerland is supposed to have some of the best drinking water in the world.
VENICE
The travel log is a silly form, but it is important, I think, to sketch out the world as we move through it, and this may be why the tourist is compelled to snap a photo of every pink eve overflowing with flowers perched over the narrow entangled alleyways of Venice, or grimacing gargoyle, or windblown blue vista dotted with sailboats (even if the internet may contain trillions of the same images). Amongst the sea of my fellow travelers I must do the same: document, record, map.
A critic at the New Yorker named Agnes Callard wrote a buzzy little troll piece called “The Case Against Travel.” Its words have been a quiet little drum in my mind for large chunks of this trip. Callard is an ethics professor at the University of Chicago who has been known to write thinky viral treatises on why she throws her children’s Halloween candy away or crosses the graduate students’ picket line to teach.
She says that travel doesn’t really change you—that the tourist is more likely to warp the exotic places of the world it visits. She seems annoyed that people wear having traveled as a sort of honorable badge. It may be true that many come home from tourism and travel (she seems to conflate the two) largely unchanged.
I’ll say for myself that I like being in a sea of those despised Others called tourists. I like to give in to those depraved seductions of the human spirit that traveling invites: eating, looking, and even shoving my phone's viewfinder out of the mass to snap a picture of the most venerated art objects.
We transfer to Lufthansa in Zurich. I write on the plane and read the beginning of My Brilliant Friend despite my penchant for contrarianism. It’s by Elena Ferrante and Chelsea, my mom, and several colleagues in the English department have all read it. I forge in because sometimes the cliché thing is the right thing. I think what I have read so far is beautiful. The character development is vivid and the power struggles complex and mercurial. It is that deep song of friendships that haunt, torment, and fill up our souls for the whole of our days. It is the perfect blend of literary and beachy. Perfect for a daybed on the rocky Italian shore.
Venice is easily one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited. It is also packed with pink-skinned tourists. We check in at our “15th Century Venetian Palace.” The man at the front desk is kind and combs his grey caterpillar mustache before saying repeatedly “Venice is a very different city.”
He says our Google Maps will not work, but instead to learn the plazas and travel the main byways rather than navigate the maximally efficient routes offered to us by the algorithms in our pocket machine.
We end up doing a bit of both. I find it easy enough to travel as the corvid flies from ristorante to duomo.
Every corner of the sinking city has a lovely gothic archway or delightfully crumbled eve. The plaster fades to renaissance brick. The walls cast long shadows over the stone and keep us mostly cool when we’re away from the sea.
Bright green vines explode over shutters and balconies in vibrant arguments for life. Most of the alleys in Venice are no more than eight feet in width. Looking up past the windows shuttered against the heat, thin strips of blue sky mirror the paths below.
I can’t help but exoticize and let my prose get purple while talking about it. We eat at a spot down the path from our hotel called Trattoria Bandeleria. There is some distinction between trattoria, ristorante, and osteria that I’m still trying to figure out. We eat branzino, squid ink spaghetti, and grilled vegetables. The fish is good, but could use salt and the spaghetti is lovely. Chelsea disputes this and says my craving for salt is a distinctly American characteristic. She insists that it is perfectly seasoned.
I like how the place has just a few tables. So many restaurants in Europe seem to have an entire fleet of tables that extend out into the plazas so as to capture wandering cruise ship passengers fresh off the loading ramp. We are right along a high brick wall, so the plastic candle can throw some light over our food and my love.
In our long walks through Venice, we amble over the ornate canal bridges and marvel at the bits of light in the ripples around little cargo boats and gondolas. We’re sucked up into the alleys and spit back out into plazas. If you listen, you can hear a baby crying, a man tuning a piano, or windows quickly being closed as the wind moves through.
After stumbling back to our courtyard, exhausted, we lug our overstuffed luggage over the golden dowels that keep the red carpet from shifting on the stairs. In our room, staring up at the large wooden beams that divide the plaster, we quickly fall asleep.
I wake at 4 in the morning to sweat and think about my students and the debate world I am leaving. Answers to old arguments, resolutions, rhetorical strategies, and classroom structures web across my mind in their typical useless searching frenzy. I think about what other people think about me—what others think about Venice: over-touristed and exceptionally beautiful. I focus on my inhalations and exhalations—count them. I try to hold my body still for long stretches of time until I’m acutely aware of the most minor discomforts. Light and a perky Chelsea Snow free me from my thrashing and half-sleep.
Our main event of the day is a gondola ride through the canals. Again, I refuse to feel guilty for doing the cliché thing.
We meet a man from Sequim, Washington who has just arrived from Chicago. We talk about Seattle and the Washington area. We say we have some friends from there. He asks if they're training kids to be protestors, or what? He slaps me on the back and talks about how difficult it must be to repair the foundations of the buildings down where the stones meet the green canal water. We share a few facts we remember about Venice. It was once a swamp that the early Venetians retreated to because the roving barbarians drove them out here. They had become a formidable naval empire in a few hundred years due to their indomitable position over the Adriatic. The guy loves trains. He is taking a train to London.
There are no cars in Venice—only boats and tight little alleys for walking. Every corner seems to have some delightful example of architectural prowess in its Gothic archways and crenelated molding. One might see warm light spilling from a little window in the evening, or bougainvillea bursting its violet over an awning. There is an attention to beauty. The streets are extremely clean and even the weeds seem to only invade the cracks ever so delicately--plaster crumbles from brick as if it were meant to peel at that careful angle, just so.
The tourists, fattened on gnocchi and gelato, come through the cobblestone streets in such fearsome droves that the city considered banning rolling bags.
In the sweltering heat, Chelsea and I navigate the lines of travelers—each fanning themselves or sucking on portable Aperol spritzes.
Again the Callard essay on travel is in me, coloring my view of the world and souring my perception of the tourist. The paradox of the tourist is that no one wants to be one—even if "travel" seems intrinsically valuable, as the author asserts. Callard claims that the tourist is more likely to change a place to fit their needs than be changed by the place itself. Chelsea agrees that the piece seems silly—someone on Twitter called it an elaborate troll move and I can't help but agree—still it seems to have his teeth in me. I think we often build up revulsion for subclasses of ourselves: stereotypes and archetypes we can Other and dismiss in order to feel better about our own choices and remind ourselves we are assuredly not that. I can't help but notice often these classifications often seem reserved for those chunks of the population who seem to be having an unadulterated good time: tourists, hipsters, yuppies, and even rednecks all seem unified in their pursuit of raw pleasure.
The tourist finds its dopamine snapping photos—poking the white circle on its pocket computer to lock away the most beautiful works of art and architecture into their tiny data dungeon, which we could call a "cloud", but is really a beige brick building somewhere in Texas with server fans humming and a billion blue and purple lights in infinite slots screwed in and carefully connected through a sublime connection of cords.
The hipster combs through its records with long nails (or else nibbled) because they recently cut smoking. The hipster sips its delicious, overpriced coffee. It retreats into its apartment of niche wonders from its niche tastes in its four-floor walkup of secrecy and scoff and swag.
The yuppy does yoga and runs on the treadmill while listening to the terror of the news, or else devours books reduced to twelve-minute snippets about how to live more efficiently and assert power in the workplace. It runs and runs until its ass matches the magazines. It has the unbridled joy of hikes and a healthy diet so it yells in its conversations at the coffee shop or holds a Zoom call wherever it damn well pleases.
The redneck drives an ATV, a truck, or a jet ski through the most peaceful happiness while ripping open sweet cheap beer cans before floating down the rivers of America whistling and dipping tobacco.
Each finds their joy and instigates ire. Each Others another as more tourist, hipster, yuppy, or redneck than they. I could love them all mostly as a wannabe Whitman might.
I turn my own chameleon skin into each in different contexts to avoid that same hate. All is another long way of saying I have loved being a tourist. I love trying to capture the little bit of gold in a high church window, or even just snapping the trillionth photo of the naked David, and marveling at the veins in its oversized hand.
In Venice, the study abroad hipster art kids let their feet dangle over the bridge while sipping wine and drawing the other bridge on their sketchpad and it is beautiful.
All the wine in Italy is delicious. Every restaurant seems to have its walls covered in bottles. I'm dumb about it all almost on purpose—having grown up among the rolling hills of green grape vines in central California. I hated the flocks of tourists that the grapes brought in. Los Angeles. They watched a film based in my hometown called Sideways and so came in droves to quote the line about Merlot. Our video stores and cowboy galleries turned into tasting rooms. Still, I don't mind a fine wine. I find it all here in Italy to be delicious. I'll join the armies of the loathed if this what it's like, one could say.
On our second night in Venice, Chelsea and I eat at a little trattoria that Renzo called Oniga. We order the special: a pile of mussels, clams, and squid in red sauce that they toss into spaghetti for the latter half of the meal.
During the meal, an American tourist asks for a plate and the waiter quickly retorts that he had already asked if they wanted small plates. The waiter then walks away frustrated and cussing under his breath. I appreciate the brutality of his honesty. There is way too much disrespect directed at waiters in America and it is refreshing to see some honesty. The conflict escalates when the waiter brings back a stack of small plates and the patron whines: "I said just ONE!" The patron complains to the manager about the waiter, but I am sure nothing will happen.
The wind picks up and the air starts to taste like a storm. Quickly, the waiters start to pin down the wax placemats with plates and gather up the umbrellas like there is some shared trauma around a recent weather event. It feels a bit like we are going down with the Titanic as the staff panics around us, and I feverishly sip my Negroni. The temperature shifts and we start trying to wrap up what has already become a very long meal--what will become a mainstay experience for our time in Italy. We begin the battle of glances and subtle gestures required to get the check without looking like an asshole. The Italians tend to eat for hours and start very late at night—sometimes twirling cacio e pepe on their forks until 1 am in the pink-lit piazzas punctuated by fountains and fluorescent hallways of trinkets and cigarettes. The sheer cacophony of imagery when one travels has a kind of numbing effect on the brain—it is a sort of drug. One is struck dumb by the sublime images flashing through you: peculiar tourists' faces, architecture, art, changes in the light--a thousand ceramic corks glazed with lemons in summer colors.
We walk home from the restaurant overstuffed on spaghetti and shellfish and red sauce. It was good, but it got a little cold as we worked through all the shells.
What we think is surely a storm turns into a light rain. We collapse under the lull of the fan and check to Twitter to see what is still depressing about America as we fall asleep.
It is interesting to try to "live twice" through a ceaselessly detailed travelogue. One has the danger of not living at all—to in fact spend most of ones' waking hours thinking about the lived world and what will later make it into writing, and of course, the inevitable failure: words never actualize the lived experience. This is also the tragedy of the photograph, I think. I took so many photographs in Italy. It was a sort of crude hobbie with my new phone's fancy camera I could go wide and carefully zoom in on a cat or rabbit hiding in the shade of an olive tree next to a Tuscan castle. I try to remember the scrambled advice from my father about how to properly compose a shot: not too much headroom, have a subject, rule of threes, and not too much empty sky.
Roland Barthes talks about how a photograph always has an inherently ghostly quality—something about how it always fixes the lived moment into the past. By definition, the photograph is a moment that can never be relived. For this reason, the photograph will always have a kind of ghostly quality to it. I like to think that when I am snapping photographs of the same statues and vistas as a thousand others that I am adding to a limitless digital crypt in my little data center.
There is sadness and beauty in even very poor photography—like a child snapping photos of his sister sprinting through a field—he has no formal training and maybe he just captures a piece of a leg ten times, or just the grass and sky. There is still something there—something permanent and beautiful.
I'm thinking about this failure and permanence as I try to recount my last days in Venice. On our first real self-guided walk through the town, we drink some espressos and eat some delicious focaccia with arugula, prosciutto, and a drizzle of olive oil. We start to experience the beginnings of what we will learn is a record-breaking heatwave: a sort of cone or shell that the storms are trapping us in. There will be wildfires in Greece and elderly dying of heat stroke in the coming weeks, but we know nothing of this now. We know only that Venice is packed with other people who were also told it is beautiful.
I take pictures. We waddle and reapply the "no chafe" stick to our inner thighs. I take pictures of golden boats overflowing with chocolate. We wander into a bookshop where gondolas, old rowboats, and bathtubs are filled with used books and comics. This was apparently because they had grown tired of their collection getting destroyed by the constant flooding of Venice's streets. I take a picture of the sign—a piece of plywood with two cat mermaids and the words, "the most beautiful bookshop in the world."
I take a picture of Chelsea as she looks over the dusty tomes. We already both have brought more than enough to read for that month. I have Chelsea reading one of my favorites, The Flamethrowers, which has a ton of delightful Italian characters and art world drama, and I am of course working through My Brilliant Friend, which is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Chelsea eats her first seasonal stone fruit. All the food in Italy is rigidly seasonal. We are missing artichokes, but are loving the zucchini flowers and yellow tomatoes. We take a selfie in front of a famous bridge and I find myself growing weary of the crowds.
I watch the gondoliers in striped shirts expertly guiding boatfuls of teenagers and their parents—many just staring at their phones. Maybe Callard was right and we tourists are ruining the world.
I take pictures of statues without bothering to decipher the Latin carved underneath them. Maybe it's a saint? Maybe it's a conquerer? Maybe Dante? We peek into a gorgeous music hall, where a man sits alone under the tall ceiling and tunes a piano. The façades of basilicas and churches capture my wandering eye. The ornate pale blue stripes on the outside walls of the duomo stun the soul! We decide not to wait in the monumental line required to see the interior. We stop at a random trattoria, something I was told never to do and order some spaghetti with clams, which turns out to be delicious. It is simple, buttery, oily, salty, and demonstrates restraint: minimalist cooking that holds strictly to tradition. Small, sweet, succulent clams. This is mostly what we would do—eat and gaze up at vines crawling over metal railings—take pictures, learn bits of Italian and fun facts about famous art. It begins to feel like a simple sort of loop, but it is lovely. We explore the beautiful modern Peggy Guggenheim museum before hopping on a ferry. The ferry takes us to a train, which will take us to Verona, where we get to see what inspired Shakespeare to write about those silly lovers so long ago.
VERONA
We eat some of the best pizza we have had yet in the station and take a train from Venice to Verona. The countryside is strikingly green for the middle of summer. I take a video of Chelsea sleeping as a quiet rain falls on signs of industrialization. Fields filled with sunflowers blister past. We're greeted by a large statue of a warrior in full plate mail stabbing another warrior, who pleads for their life on their back on the ground. It looks and feels a little like upstate New York with the humidity. We wheel our bags too far as I guide with my phone out like it's a compass. We park and I look to see what's on Italian TV. Turns out there is a whole world of music videos, news, and gossip. Stupid to say like I'm 20, but it makes our chunk of the media landscape feel small and insignificant and easily replaceable. Some of the videos are in black and white and are from the 60s. I film one of them because it reminds me of that opening scene in Ghost World. We search for a restaurant from our vast digital file of notes, spreadsheets, and lists. Trattoria Al Bersagliere Enoteca is supposed to be good. Looks catered to locals. It is extremely warm. The flight of cured pork cuts: salami and three kinds of prosciutto are my favorite. I am maybe already drinking too much. We narrowly evade eating horse meat ravioli. I drink a Negroni and red wine. We eat the risotto made with Verona's famous Amarone della Valpolicella, a type of red wine. It is good. We walk through the white light of the miles and everyone is out eating gelato and riding bicycles. We are staying next to the Castel San Pietro and the AirBnB smells like a dungeon crypt. The walls are stone. Verona is a walled city with a Roman colosseum at its center that dates back to 89 BC.
We walk the Castel Vecchio Bridge over the Adige River. The Adige River hugs the city like a friendly snake. I take more pictures of vines crumbling over stone. I seem to be addicted to the visage. I take pictures of Chelsea "about town": over-the-shoulder shots of her and the city. She wears a black dress and red scarf in her hair. She bends her upper half out of Juliet's window. I take a picture of a stranger touching the Juliet's boob on the statue because that's supposed to be good luck. I'm reminded of people squatting and doing the peace sign on John Lenon's strawberry fields memorial in Central Park. Chelsea ducks into Juliet's tomb. She explains to me how the frescoes are painted. She stands, mouth agape in front of a glass case filled with macaroons every color of the pastel rainbow. According to the internet, the architecture in Verona a mix of the Romanesque, Middle Ages, and Renaissance. The city is quiet and beautiful. The city feels Shakespearean. Chelsea stands in front of a stone-carved sphynx. I snap photos of what is probably an emperor's garb. I capture an image of Dante. I capture the mid-most state of Chelsea's black dress twirling: freeze the action in my little phone box. We take a hot glass funicular to the top of Castel San Pietro. The air inside the gondola is thick and we feel trapped. Australian children whine about wanting more and more gelato. The parents say "no" with extreme disdain. We catch a view of the gorgeous city spotted with clocktowers and minarets. Each city has its hues and this one seems to be somewhere between crimson and washed brick. We cozy up in a little bar perched over the river in the "Citta Antica" portion of the city called Terraza Bar Al Ponte. I take a picture of Santa Claus playing pool.
We are lucky enough to catch a rendition of Giuseppe Verdi's Aida staged in the colosseum for a little over 20 bucks. Hundreds of dancers dressed in black and white leotards hold staves with large eyes on them. An enormous silver hand, powered by hidden pistons claws over the stage. A large silver ball rises into the sky. The sun sets. Swallows dart in and out of the small holes in the colosseum walls. The sky turns purple before fading from blue. A woman sings and weeps in the middle of the stage. People crawl naked out of holes. We leave at halftime because we are old and talk about what we think will happen to the slave Aida who fell in love with a military commander Radames. "In her looks I trace an unwonted joy."
Before we know it, we are on a train again, on our way to a huge beautiful apartment in Florence. Italy is already easily the most beautiful place I have ever been.
FLORENCE
Chelsea says it irritates her when speeches and essays draw too much attention to the author’s own anxieties. And it is, of course, a bit of a cliché move for the writer to begin by describing their natural environs before launching into the thing they set to write about. My coffee cup is stained. I stare at the blinking white cursor. The pepper tree outside is thick with rain. In a famous post-modern short story called “Lost in the Funhouse,” John Barthes writes about the process of writing a short story while telling a short story: “The beginning should recount the events between Ambrose’s first sight of the funhouse early in the afternoon and his entering it with Magda and Peter in the evening. The middle would narrate all relevant events from the time he goes in to the time he loses his way; middles have the double and contradictory function of delaying climax while at the same time preparing the reader for it and fetching him to it. Then the ending would tell what Ambrose does while he’s lost, how he finally finds his way out, and what everybody makes of the experience. So far there’s no real dialogue, very little sensory detail, and nothing in the way of theme. And a long time has gone by already without anything happening; it makes a person wonder. We haven’t even reached Ocean City yet: we will never get out of the funhouse” and so on until the protagonist “…die(s) of starvation telling himself stories in the dark.”
All is to make an excuse to say—to put down in a portable retina display representation of ink, a branded series of IPS LCD and OLED display—that I am riding the Surfliner train from Lompoc to Los Angeles in California and Hurricane Hilary is making its mild debut in the gutter rivers. Branches and floating cars float in the beige flows rushing quickly whatever was abandoned in the aquaduct. We have been back from Italy for three weeks and are still feeling filled with joy and the memory of delicious food. It feels strange to write about Italy because we don’t have any “stories” in the traditional sense of bloody action, itching conflicts, mountain climaxes, and desperate rescues. Everything went relatively smoothly. Still, the act of carefully describing everything we did still feels valuable. Maybe we didn’t study as much as we should have, or didn’t learn enough Italian words, and fell short of full immersion in the culture and weren’t ever invited in for Sunday Gravy by a grandma who would gladly entertain any strangers’ kids while their parents feasted, and maybe this whole blog project is the attempted remedy for that nagging guilt one feels when terminally online and poisonously self-aware of the saccharine and self-indulgent travel blog narratives we find ourselves in here, right now in this historical moment. At least by putting the experience into text, I can actualize and make permanent what felt like a dream. I like the idea of a travel blog that is sort of useless to the average traveler—so dense with self-referentiality, idiosyncrasies, and digressions that it becomes intolerable for someone looking for the recommendation dump of a good vlog or TripAdvisor post.
In Florence, we again stubbornly decide to walk from the train station to the apartment where we will be staying. The sidewalks are extremely narrow and are made of large cobbled stones. We generally need to yield to the tourists and hordes of students on study-abroad programs. The part of the town where the train dumps you is flecked with neon signs of late capital: Starbucks and Burger King. When you cross the river the city opens up. We see the eponymous “wine window,” a mainstay from the black plague, where you could walk up and buy wine without getting infected. We walk over the Arno River past the famous Ponte Vecchio Bridge, which according to the internet, is the “first segmental Arch bridge built in the West.” We find our spot Our AirBnB host gives us a skittish tour of the apartment. It is large and filled with marble. She speaks very little English, but we get enough of the details about how to survive for a week. There is a painting of a huge baby in a living room painted in a hybrid realist Renaissance style with nods to the contemporary. The baby suckles her mother and stares directly into your eyes. The father is passed out. The rocket launch is being broadcast on TV. At the edge of the image, toward the frame, it begins to fray and the muted tones give way to garish stripes of bright color as if only an afterthought nod to abstract expressionism. The apartment is huge and feels a bit like a museum. The old lamps and wilted flowers grow on me. We shower and sleep.
In the morning, we go to a spot that Stanley Tucci loves called Babae. We eat a little Los Angeles guilty pleasures: what is essentially an Italian take on an open-faced bacon egg, cheese, and avocado toast. We are quickly adapting to a pour-over-free lifestyle. It’s a rough life sipping down Americanos and double espressos, but we’re learning to love the darker roasts favored by the Italians. We see most of the museum workers are on strike—their red flags and speeches seem another tender object for the feast of our gaze: another artisanal treat, so opt to spend our first day ambling around the city. Florence is packed with dough-faced undergraduates on study abroad programs and turning the city into a bit of a college town. We take in the blue-striped duomo from outside. It is magnificent and ornate. There are reproductions of Michaelangelo’s “David” all over the place, along with other works from Biblical and Ancient Greek narratives. In a large copper statue, Perseus holds the head of Medusa high over his body. Tendrils coil from the opened neck of the head and fallen body. In his hand, he grips the sword gifted to him by Athena. The courtyard outside the Duomo is crowded with other statues, and one that I learned later is called the “Rape of the Sabine Woman”, which is a nod to a moment in Ancient Rome when men decided to kidnap young women en masse.
We eat a fancy seven-course meal at a Michelin-star restaurant called Gune. The bread comes in a little wooden box with tiny drawers holding artisanal sourdough rolls and perfectly baked focaccia. It is an ascendant path from there into squab five ways and so on—each dish is a work of art with attendant dry ice spilling over branches, little dots of sauces, amberjack crudo cappuccinos, and some lovely cocktails from a very friendly mixologist who tells us where to get a fancy drink in town.
We take a pasta-making class and they teach us to make pasta from scratch. After watching a cute little video in the basement explicating why Italians love pasta so much, we get to work forming a tiny volcano basin for the egg and rolling the dough into a translucent yellow sheet. We cut ravioli with stamper and roll the tagliatelle on a pasta guitar. Through flour, it falls in gorgeous hairs. The teachers cook the ravioli in brown butter and sage—the ravioli in a red sauce. We sit at a big table with our classmates to drink wine and eat. It is, like almost everything we consume, delicious. We make friends with a couple from North Carolina. We drink beers at one of the big plaza tourist traps and talk about America. They are moving to Los Angeles and seem deeply worried. He’s in the Coast Guard and it was his 33rd choice in the list of cities where the government could have placed them. They’re also on their honeymoon and need someone else to talk to. We take them to some of the bars the mixologist from Gune recommended. One of them is a spooky speakeasy three stairwells into the earth. Arched walls, a strict no phone policy, and paintings of vampires lit by candlelight make the place feel genuinely of another era. It is called Rasputin after the Russian mystic who the newspapers called a false prophet and Antichrist for his sneaky influence over the tsar and considerable influence over the final years of the Russian Empire. He was assassinated with two bullets to the body and one to the head after refusing tea and cakes laced with cyanide. He fought for his life in his last moments but eventually collapsed into a snowbank and there was probably a dramatic contrast between the blood and the snow according to Wikipedia.
We took the couple to a big indoor market called Mercato Centrale with all sorts of trendy vendors pushing modern takes on pasta, pizza, and pasta-pizza-adjacent classics like the divine deep-fried rice balls known as arancini. The North Carolina couple seemed happy to notice they have a spot selling smash-burgers. Chelsea and I had our favorite pizza yet heaped with smoked buffalo mozzarella. In the morning, we took a day trip to Cinque Terra, which deserves its own section of self-aware descriptions and maximalist revelry, so I’ll save those tellings for another post.
We go see Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni’s sculpture of David, the hands and hand drawn large so the people below the duomo could see. The realism of the veins is striking and I couldn’t help having a bit of a moment with the piece. It is the most celebrated sculpture in the world and as you circle its base, the figure takes on different emotions. Michelangelo picked out the marble himself and claimed he could see the figure inside the stone before he even started chipping away with steel chisels he designed himself. He was a Neo-Platonist who believed the real, ideal form was within the marble block. Eventually, the pope demanded a leaf be placed over the genitals, along with every other nude statue in the city. We ended our trip in Florence at the Antico Ristoro di Cambi, where I feasted on the iconically rare Florentine steak. It is the 4th of July. We meet some loud Americans at a blues-themed bar after dinner and drink too much with them. One of them is very loud and keeps saying “thank you” very loudly in a highly affected Italian accent like people are going to appreciate that sort of thing. An Italian man walks by muttering “ubriaco” with disdain. Chelsea and I stumble home satisfied with having experienced a little bit of home on the most American day of the year.
