Duomo @ MindSay

I prepared for my trip to Florence by reading EM Forsters A Room With A View, but the book, however much fun to read, was misleading because it implied there would be rooms to sleep in in Florence. We've had a lot of trouble finding places to stay, with views or otherwise. The original plan was to spend a day in Sienna after Pisa, and then go on to Florence. But Lindsay was supposed to book the hostel in Sienna, and apparently the computer connections aren't too reliable in Mali, so she asked her mother to do it for her from her US computer. Apparently her mom forgot to make the booking, so we decided rather than spend a single night in Sienna, it would be best to go straight to Florence. We showed up without a place to stay, however, and after a quick consultation with the guidebook decided it would be best to go to tourist information in the train station and get a room for the night.

The woman in tourist information took one look at us and said "Cheap cheap cheap?" and we said yes, we needed a place to stay for two people, one night at the cheapest possible rate. She smiled and nodded and made a lot of phonecalls in rapid sucession, speaking in breathless Italian, and finally after several tries found us two hostel beds for the night. We thanked her, and received the map she gave us and made our way through some very unpleasant and unseasonable rain to our hotel room. With the room taken care of, we decided to brave the wet in order to do some sight seeing, and found ourselves outside Saint Croce Church, the church where the hero and heroine of A Room With A View have their first real conversation. We planned to duck our heads in and take a quick peak, but we soon found out that that was impossible.

The church turned out to be the burial sight of Galileo, Machiavelli, Micheangelo and others, though not, interestingly enough of Dante. Dante is buried in Ravenna, but that didn't stop Saint Croce from building a huge garrish monument in honor of the Florentine poet. I've never been a big Dante fan despite slogging my way through three different translations of the Inferno. When I saw his monument I think I understood why. He always looks incredibly dour, as if he was having bad indigestion; I think it comes out in his writing.

The next day we had to move to our hostel that Lindsay had also booked from Mali (the deal was that she would book Florence and Sienna, I would book Venice and Pisa). Rather than head straight to our Hostel, however, we decided to do some early sight seeing, and made it to the Duomo in time to be first in line when it opened. The guidebook was not too enthusiastic about the church, claiming it was "chilly and austere" on the inside, but I enjoyed it immensely. The inside doesn't feel cluttered the way some of these churches can be. After the Duomo we headed across the way to the Baptistry to gaze at Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise," which was obscured by a sea of tourists. I'm short enough, however, that I eventually wrangled  my way to the front, and I'm glad I did, the doors are truly breathtaking.

The Piazza was beginning to get absolutely swamped with tour groups, so we headed back to our hostel to collect our bags and carried them through the wet and cold to the hostel we had booked for the next five nights.

The hostel looked amazing, it was up a steep flight of stairs, but had large windows and wooden floors as well as offering free internet. There were signs all over in broken English reminding guests that "The waisting of the energy was a crime against the enviroment" and other helpful hostel hints. When we got there, however, the woman couldn't find our booking. There was much sturm und drang, and the management was called, while we nervously looked over the reservation and tried to decipher the rapid Italian the receptionist was shouting into the phone. Eventually we realized that the reservation was for May, and we were here in June. The hostel was booked solid all five nights, and we had nowhere to stay. We asked the receptionist if she had any suggestions of places to stay, and she said that as far as she knew the entire city was booked solid. It turns out that the next day, the second of June, was a national holiday, and meaning it was a popular time to visit. She wouldn't let us use the phone, but she was nice enough to let us store our bags while we found a place to stay.

We returned to the street with absolutely no idea of what to do. We found a phone and began to call all of the hostels in the guidebook. All of them were booked solid for the next two nights, but we finally found a place that will take us for the last three nights of our stay. Lindsay went off to find an internet cafe where she could confirm the booking, and I headed in the other direction to find us a bed for the night. My plan was to head to the tourist office, but I realized that the streets on the way to the train station seemed to be lined with wall to wall hotels. I stopped into a few of the cheaper looking ones, all of which seemed to be booked solid for the next two nights (I even encountered a panicky couple whose reservations had also fallen through screaming at an unfortunate receptionist) Finally I found a one star hotel with a single room left. It was little more than a broom cubbard, but breakfast was included, and the room had a TV. Grateful to have a place to stay I headed back to collect both Lindsay and the luggage. I've learned two things from the whole experience--the first is never have anybody make a hotel booking from Mali, and the second is that commercials are more entertaining in Italian.

Writing from Bologna, where the keyboards are erratic at best, much like the busses. My hostel is located slightly outside of town, and there is a special bus that runs to the center of the city every two hours. When I took it this afternoon I was the only person on the bus and the driver kept trying to make friendly conversation with me. I appreciated the sentiment, but as he didn't speak any English and the only Italian I know comes from a passing love of Opera and four long ago years of Latin, we need to resort to pantimime to communicate. He kept turning around so he could look me in the eye, and I divided my time between trying to parse his sentences and looking nervously at the road, which he was completely disregarding.

So far Bologna has been great, but most of the sights were closed by the time I got to town. I have a full day tomorrow, though, and plan to make the most of it. The train ride here was fun, though, I shared my aisle with two very nice Indian men. Neither spoke much English, so we communicated with sentences that went subject\verb\hand gesture till I asked if they were here for holiday. One man said yes, but the other said he was coming here to live. He had to flee India because his brother was in trouble with the Indian mafia, and he feared retribution. This was shocking to find out, but even more shocking to see in pantomime.

And now for something completely different.

Verona was lovely. A small town compared to Venice and Bologna, but it had two things that Venice lacked: Cars and Italian People. I was not as productive as I might have been in Verona, choosing to skip the Opera arena in favor of sitting in cafes with a book and watching the people go past. I did manage to make it to the Casa Giulietta, however; a seventeenth century Veronese house done up as the house where Juliet Capulette lived. To tell you the truth I thought the whole thing was a little hokie. I appreciate that Shakespeare set his play in Verona for a reason, but there's no way Shakespeare could have ever seen a postcard of Verona, let alone the city itself. Still I had to respect the city's love of the play. The walls of Juliet's house were covered in graffitti from young lovers writing their names all along the outside, and the love lorn would write messages for Juliet which they would leave on the walls or by her statue. I much prefered the piazza outside the casa, which was an old town square and was covered with vendors selling fruit, food and souvenirs. In the center of the piazza there was a raised platform where I sat to eat my panini and coca light. I noticed a pair of ominous chains hanging from the platform and consulted my guidebook, which informed me that prisoners used to be chained to the platform and the townspeople would pass by and pelt them with garbage. Charming.

After the casa I walked around the city for a bit, and decided to cross the river away from the tourist attractions. The other side of the river was dominated by a steep hill, and I found a cobblestone street that lead up it. I enjoyed the walk, but eventually had to stop because my eyes started welling up, and I began to sneeze. It's been so long since I found myself in the middle of nature, that I've forgotten I usually have allergies this time of year. They haven't been much of a problem in London, seeing as it still rarely gets about the fifties (there were about two weeks of sunshine, which I have since begun to fear might have been total flukes) but the Italian sunshine caused the verdure to bloom, which in turn caused me to sneeze. I've learned not to mind the hayfever, but as I walked back I began to notice that I was getting the oddest looks from people, and I realized just how striking bright red eyes can be. I figured I must have looked like I had been crying, so I tried to counteract it by smiling broadly at people. This just seemed to frighten them even more, so I ended by simply keeping my eyes glued to the pavement.

I ducked into a cafe to recover, and ended up getting dinner there. The cafe had a fabulous view of Verona across the water, and it was the ideal place to watch the sun set behind the duomo. Italy is filled with mosquitos (I had shared my room with one the night before, as well as with three charming Australians,) and at sunset swarms of swallows came out to feast on the bloodsucking pests. Watching the birds swoop in the twilight, and feeling the day begin to cool I sneezed, and, however horrific it may have looked, I smiled.