Day 5

May 8, 2003
(Thursday)

Livorno, Italy

At dinner last night, they featured several French specials in honor of the Nice anchorage. Laura had duck, Robert had snails and frog legs that he says taste just like alligator.

5:00 am

We are up at this ungodly hour, not because of our jet lag (which we seem to finally have gotten over), but because we have an all-day tour that demands we show up at some frightening hour to board a bus.

6:35 am

At each port, part of the food is "cultural" and features local cuisine. Italian food at breakfast includes Italian sausages and spinach tofu soup, tofu being a traditional Italian dish, apparently...

7:26 am

We board our tour bus and head for Florence ("Firenze" is how the Italians say it, for some odd reason). Our tour guide is Luca, which is Italian for Luke.

Livorno (which is where the boat parked) is the port for Florence and Pisa. Mostly it is an industrial port, and we get a lovely scenic view of cranes and container ships. Florence is the main urban area, but it is about an hour away.

Pisa used to be the main port of Tuscany, but about 500 years ago, they moved it to Livorno. We're puzzled by this, too. Pisa is inland (although on the river Arno) and Livorno is on the coast. Why would you ever have an inland port when you had a perfectly good coastal port? The answer seems to be "because we're Italian."

On the drive in, we see many Mediterranean pines, which are also called "umbrella pines" because they look like open umbrellas. These, apparently, are the source of pine nuts, used in making many Italian dishes (Luca shares his pesto recipe with us--cautioning us to use a wooden mortar and "pistol" to mash the basil and pine nuts together).

8:00 am

Most of the things we see as we pass through the Tuscany district on our way to Florence are pretty recent. Bear in mind, however, that "recent" here means "only 800 years old." Many vineyards (Chianti grapes) and olive groves.

Pisa has some "old" stuff, meaning, "dating back to the Roman Empire." In fact, Luca says that recently 16 Roman ships were found in the Pisa harbor and are being carefully excavated so they can see what Roman sailors did. Although Florence existed at that time, it was pretty much filled with peasants, who didn't do anything interesting.

The Arno is the important waterway around here, and it runs through the center of Florence and turns up all over the place between Florence and Pisa. We're driving along the Arno river valley as we make our way to Florence.

9:30 am

We arrive in Florence. They don't allow cars and buses into downtown Florence, and once we get there we see why. All the roads are five foot wide alleys.

We start off at the "center of the city" which the Florentines cleverly marked with a column. That's all that's there. A big, empty square and a column.

9:53 am

At the next big square (the Square of the Lords), we get a view of Michelangelo's David. Well, not the real one, but a clever imitation (I can't believe it's not David™ brand statuary). It's the same size and made from the same marble, but it's not the original (the original is in the Academy of Arts someplace nearby).

Ironically enough, the statue of David is about the same size as Goliath (17 feet). It took Michelangelo three years to make this monster, but it was a real shrewd career move for him. After he finished it, he was famous and was able to raise his rates and do pretty much whatever he wanted to.

Once David was put in the square, everybody wanted to get into the act, so there's a bunch of other statues by other sculptors there. The ones that were commissioned by the various Dukes of Savoy all have the faces of the dukes. So, the giant statue of Neptune has the face of the duke (we thought it didn't look like Neptune...).

There's also a statue of Lorenzo de Medici, which we thought remarkable because there was nearly always a pigeon sitting on his head, making him look ridiculous. Probably not what he had in mind when he commissioned it.

Out of the forest of statues, only two (besides David) are really special. One is of Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa (with the body of Medusa below and guts coming out her severed neck). This statue is made of cast bronze and the entire thing (about 10 feet tall) was done in one casting. It took the guy about 10 years to get it right (you can see the seam along Perseus' leg).

The other special one is called the "Rape of the Sabines" and is made from marble (it's not nearly as lascivious as the title sounds, it's three figures groping upwards). The deal with this one is that Bellini (circa 1583) made a bet with the dukes that he could make three statues out of one block of marble. He won the bet.

The amazing thing is the detail on this baby. It looks like it was made from some soft pliable material, not cold, hard marble. One guy has his hand on a female butt, and you can see where his fingers impress the flesh. Yow!

Sadly, there isn't time to visit the Uffizi Palace of the Arts, full of famous paintings, but the concourse is full of sculptures of famous people--Galileo, Machiavelli, daVinci.

10:30 am

We enter the district of the Church of the Holy Cross. And, hoo boy, is this one big church! It dominates the square, and has a really (really) ornate facade. The deal is that the church was a monastery (still is, actually), but had kind of a sleazy front. So sometime in the 1800s, the Englishman Lord Sloane took up a collection among his friends to pay for a fancy-schmancy facade for it. Oddly enough, Sloane was Jewish, so the monks commemorated his generosity with big star of David at the top of the facade.

The big attraction of the church, however, is that a whole mess of famous Italians are buried inside. The really famous ones have fancy memorials (about ten feet across) with statues and stuff. Luca was very proud that Michelangelo was there, but we thought it was way cooler that Galileo had a tomb there. Apparently, they stashed him in the courtyard for a 100 years or so until his ill favor with the church cooled down enough for them to get away with building him a fancy tomb.

Dante and Machiavelli are also buried there, and there's a memorial to Marconi (inventor of wireless radio) and Enrico Fermi (nuclear scientist, first atomic chain reaction underneath the University of Chicago basketball court in 1939).

11:50 am

We get some free time to blow some money at a genuine Italian leather joint (Robert gets a handmade Italian deer skin wallet "Maybe it's Bambi's mom!" and has it monogrammed by the in-house goldsmith).

We're waiting with our guide when a scuffle breaks out and we see a guy wrestling with an Asian woman who was selling scarves. Before we could change into our Superman costumes, Luca said, "It's okay, he's police."

Seems that the scarf-selling lady was also a pickpocket and had snagged a tourist's wallet. At which point, the plainclothes cops moved in to bust her. They got the wallet and all her scarves, but she took off like a rabbit.

We keep getting warned about pickpockets (and we pay attention to the warnings!), but this kind of brings it home. Especially since this lady had been trying to sell Laura a scarf not ten minutes earlier (Laura wisely kept her distance).

(We asked Luca how he knew the guy was a cop, since he was in plain clothes. He said, "Police dress like thugs, but they look you in the eye. Real crooks look behind you." It didn't exactly track for us, either...)

12:19 pm

Now we go to see a real church, not a tiny one like the Church of the Holy Cross. We go see the Cathedral of Florence (Mary of the Flower), which can hold up to 25,000 people. (We bet that their announcements go on a long time!)

It's a massive church (from a block away, you can't get all of it in the picture), beautifully faced with white, green, and red marble. It's about 380 feet tall, and no building in Florence can be taller than that (so that you can always see the Cathedral, in theory).

The really cool part is the Baptistry. In the olden days, you had to be baptized before you could go into the church. This kind of raised the problem of--if you have to be baptized before you can go into the church, but you get baptized in a church, how the heck do you get in to get baptized?

The solution was to build a separate (gigantic) building called a Baptistry, where the only thing you did was baptize people. Then they could head into the regular church and join the 12,000 person communion line.

The Baptistry door consists of twelve gorgeous panels of gold-covered bronze. The panels are little 3-D pictures of important scenes from the Old Testament. Back then (500 years ago), most of the people were peasants, and many of them dropped out of school before they reached kindergarten. As a result, their reading skills were sub-par. So the pictures taught them the important bits of the bible.

The entrance to the Baptistry

Detail of two of the panels (top: Joseph meets his brothers in Egypt after they kidnapped him; bottom: Battle of Jericho)

It took the guy who created it about 27 years to finish it(!). Strangely enough, the New Testament door isn't gilded and only took a couple of years to finish. Guess back then, they felt the Old Testament was more important.

My fashion knocks me out (actual display in store window)

12:53 pm

Our feetsies are killing us, it's hot, and it's time for lunch! Luca takes us to the Hotel Astoria Restaurant, which is in a whole different dimension that your typical US Hotel Restaurant.

We get served a lovely red wine (the label says "Generic Table Wine" so we can only imagine what the good stuff tastes like). Then we get served a vegetable lasagna, followed by veal with gravy and vegetables. Finally, dessert is peaches buried in white cake with whipped cream, drizzled with chocolate.

All this is served in a room that is 125 years older than the US (a fairly "new" room in other words). Them Italians sure understand about food!

2:36 pm

We all waddle back onto the bus, which heads for Pisa. Everybody (everybody) on the bus (except the driver) immediately participates in the Italian tradition of taking a nap after lunch. This is so civilized.

3:50 pm

We pull into Pisa and get off the bus about a half-mile from the tower. The famous leaning tower is pretty much the only touristy thing in Pisa, but then, they don't need a heck of a lot else.

The first part of the walk is a pleasant amble through tree-covered neighborhoods. Then we hit Cheesy Souvenir Alley, where you can buy drinks, snacks, and various tacky little souvenirs. This continues until you reach the park that surrounds the tower and its associated church and Baptistry.

At that point you hit Incredibly Tacky Souvenir Alley, where you can buy leaning tower replicas in all sizes from one inch to four feet (some of them filled with olive oil). You can also buy lighters, plates, towels, posters, key chains, and glasses with pictures of the leaning tower on them. Also replica guns, crossbows, swords and maces ("Nothing says, 'I've been to Pisa' like a genuine replica mace!").

The tower itself really does lean. The surprising part (to us uneducated Americans at any rate) was that the tower is the bell tower to a church, which stands right next to it. And across from the church is a Baptistry, which is even bigger than the one in Florence. There's also a tomb area that's pretty huge.

The whole area is surrounded by medieval walls. In the old days, Moslem pirates liked to attack Pisa and try to storm the churches so they could burn them and then desecrate the graves (this was well before TV, so they had to devise other means of entertaining themselves). So, the churches were always the best protected areas.

We looked at the tower, verified that it does, in fact, lean, took a picture and went back to the bus (without the souvenir mace, much to Robert's regret).

5:30 pm

We arrive back at the boat, and head for Naples. Touristic adventures there include the fabulously cool city of Pompeii! Volcanoes! Petrified people! Erotic friezes! Hoo boy!

Robert & Laura
Headed S-SW from Livorno, Italy

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