The Great Gigolo Hunt of 2007, Part 5B

Day Five (Afternoon)—October 4, 2007

Once the wayward calf of our group was found and leashed to his wife, we made our way through the crowd to the next tourist hot spot following the Piazza del Duomo and the Bapistry: the Piazza della Signoria. Basically, it’s an open air museum. Michelangelo’s David stood guard just outside the Piazza della Signoria’s main building, the Palazzo Vecchio, for a few hundred years before the Florentine city elders decided that the elements were taking a bit of a toll on Dave and he was moved inside the Accademia dell’Arte.

Many a Florentine pigeon mourned that day.

There is now a full-sized replica of David outside the front doors of the Palazzo Vecchio, where he spends his time hanging out (literally) across from his good friend, Hercules, who had just kicked the ass of Cacus. (Say that five times fast.)

The Palazzo Vecchio itself...well, I would’ve liked to see the interior of it, but there just wasn’t enough time. As it was, we didn’t even really get to view the various artwork on the far side of the Piazza della Signoria (I’m pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a huge statue of Cosimo I de’ Medici and Neptune palling around over there); most of our time was spent looking over the fairly packed Loggia dei Lanzi as we pushed our way past the crowd, past the Galleria degli Uffizi (man, I wish I could’ve gone in there, but...well, you know, just not enough time...), and on to our next stop, the Basilica di Santa Croce.

I know it’s stating the obvious, but I really would’ve loved to have more than just one day to see all of Florence. Even if it was humid as can be (and I live in the muggy south, mind you). Just so much to see, and never enough time to see it all.

And even where there was enough time, there were certain things we just couldn’t see. Case in point: the Basilica di Santa Croce. Santa Croce is the largest Franciscan church in the world as well as Florence’s primary Franciscan church, and as this day just so happened to fall on the Feast of Saint Francis, Santa Croce was closed to the general (um, tourist) public.

There are a couple of quite famous Italian bones in Santa Croce, some of whom you may have heard of: that artist guy Michelangelo, that astronomer guy Galileo, that writer guy Machiavelli, that opera guy Rossini, and that radio guy Marconi.

But one Famous Florentine you won’t find there is Dante Alighieri. If you remember your old advanced literature class, you should remember at least a little bit of a certain poem he wrote called The Divine Comedy. The Divine Comedy, among its many accomplishments, is the first Western piece of literature written in a “Vulgate” language as opposed to Latin. Rather than being in the language of the Church, The Divine Comedy was in that vernacular language known as Italian that the scruffy people on the street spoke.

And Florence and her politics permeate The Divine Comedy, particularly in some of the smellier parts of the Inferno. Dante very much loved his city, but political finagling led to his exile and he died never seeing his native city again. As any first-time reader of the Inferno probably remembers (and, yes, it was probably just the Inferno, since reading about Hell and its torments always came across as much sexier than Purgatory and Paradise), Dante’s Florence was torn in two by the Ghibellines and the Guelphs (and don’t mix your White Guelphs with your Black Guelphs). Short explanation: the Ghibellines liked the way the Holy Roman Emperor was doing things as opposed to the Pope whereas the Guelphs (yep, you guessed it) liked how the Pope was doing things as opposed to the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante was a Guelph, and after a whole lot of feudin’ and fussin’ that would have made the Hatfields and McCoys proud the Guelphs eventually won out and exiled the Ghibellines.

Oh, and what started the whole Ghibelline/Guelph war? A bride who was ditched at the altar, more or less.

At any rate, once the Guelphs held Florence in their hands, there was a further split (gee, politics have never been easy, have they) between the Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs (which initially really did start out as a family feud). Short explanation: the Black Guelphs wanted the Pope to keep his finger in the Florentine Pie whereas the White Guelphs wanted more independence from Rome. The Black Guelphs (aided by some Ghibellines) got the upper hand on the White Guelphs and whupped them pretty good. Dante, a White Guelph, was then banished from Florence, and he died in exile and was buried in Ravenna.

At any rate, enough of the history/literature lesson. I mainly go into it because, since we couldn’t actually go inside Santa Croce, we spent some of the 2-hour break we had in the Piazza di Santa Croce sitting within spitting distance of a marble statue of Dante sitting outside Santa Croce.

Now that I think about it, my Mom and I probably could have spent some of that 2-hour break going back to the Piazza della Signore to get a closer look at what we didn’t get a chance to see, but a) it was very very humid and we were feeling really sticky, b) we were dead tired and our feet were hurting, and c) we didn’t want to run the risk of getting lost.

Of course, we could have went to see the optional demo at the leatherworker’s shop that some of our group went to see, but since the Piazza di Santa Croce had quite a few souvenir stands and food stands and we still had a bit of souvenir shopping to do (and not much time to get it done in, seeing as tomorrow would be our last full day in Italy), we opted out of it.

As an aside, my third wedding anniversary was coming up in a couple of weeks. Leather is the new traditional third anniversary wedding gift, and as I’d yet to get my Bitter Half anything in terms of a souvenir I probably should have gone to Ye Olde Leatherworker’s Shoppe. (Then again, being a good Catholic girl and all, anything leathery I would have been interested in buying him probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for me to buy in front of my Mom. As it is, I got him an apron with David and his boys from the neck down on it.)

So we tied up a few loose ends on our respective souvenir shopping lists and, bah, it wasn’t until Florence when I found the naughtier type of postcard that I’d been looking for all along (the Roman and Venetian ones I saw were far too modest). Of course, mailing postcards out at this point would’ve been...well, I would’ve been back home before they arrived.

Which is something that kind of hit me as we were sitting around resting our slowly swelling, tired feet...my vacation was nearing its close. I’d seen so much in the last few days, yet there was still so much I hadn’t seen and there was still so much to absorb. (And, as I write this more than a year later, I feel that there are still things about it that have yet to sink in. Which is a good thing...keeps the memory fresh and keeps the old brain muscles processing.)

At any rate, after a couple of hours resting a bit and sweating a lot in the Florentine heat, our group reassembled and we headed off to our hotel, to get ready for our dinner party...

Gaze upon the pictures, while they last...