My birthday trip was a mini-road trip from Rome to Florence and back again. This time our car was a little VW Up! (exclamation included), which turned out to be one of the worst cars we've ever driven in terms of its stellar inability to pick up on an incline. Part of my present was that I and I alone got to drive, and it was awesome. Except for moments when it was terribly stressful, like driving through the tiny, tourist-crowded streets of Assisi, struggling to parallel park on an incline with a car that seemed to leap forward with each press of the gas, while Sean barked instructions from the street and a nearby shopkeeper openly stared at us as she watched from her doorway, smoking. Oh, and then the hotel owner, who had just told me to park then, announced that after we unloaded we'd have to move the car to one of the many underground lots on the other side of the city. I had already had Sean take the bags out of the car when we pulled up to the hotel, so I suffered that parking experience for nothing--and then had to inch the car through the medieval streets again to the parking lot!
Assisi, though, was exquisitely lovely. Our hotel was just a few minutes walk from the basilica and had been recommended by an adviser at the Academy, though we couldn't secure her top-floor room with the awesome view I'd seen on FB. The guy at the front desk mentioned the Bosco di S. Francesco, a recently-opened path that leads from just adjacent the basilica, downhill for about a mile to a former convent that has an incredible view of the monastic complex atop the hill. We decided to go right then, at sunset, and though we were a little chilled in the woods (which were still carpeted with these beautiful purple flowers!) it was really beautiful.
From Assisi we drove north to Florence, deciding to skip my original plan of stopping in Perugia or Arezzo for the more scenic route, which would also help us avoid the expensive highway tolls. Scenic yes, and bumpy too! But it brought us into Florence through less familiar landscape, with densely wooded hills, than the wheat-and-cypress view you typically think of with Tuscany, so that was nice.
Alas, the weather in Florence was not cooperative. On my birthday it was 58 degrees and blowing hard! Luckily, I had bought another winter coat in the same vintage shop where I bought my red leather and green wool coats (almost ten years ago, now!), and I wore it even though it hadn't been dry-cleaned yet, which grossed Sean out. Hey, given the choice between freezing to death in a light jacket or wearing a slightly musty-smelling coat, I've got no problems. Ironically, we have since had the coat dry-cleaned, and the smell has not actually improved that much. Oh well!
We did manage to visit the Pitti Palace (where it cost 50 euro for the two of us to visit all of the museums, which is ludicrous! ), where Sean discovered that looking at the 19th-century allegorical ceiling paintings was much more interesting than the Renaissance art on the walls. There was a lapis lazuli show on in the Argento museum, but I actually wasn't as impressed by it as I'd expected. What we did NOT get to see: the Uffizi and the Accademia. Foolish me, I'd figured we didn't need reservations on an October weekday. LIES. Especially because of the rain. The lines were insanely long even in the late afternoon, so we gave up.
Florence will always for me be a little tinged with nostalgia, no matter how many times I visit. Walking around the still-familiar streets, it was incredible to think that it had been almost a decade since Meredith, Carla, Anna, and I (and occasionally Sara too) had wandered them. Everywhere I saw groups of four and five American study-abroad students (almost always white and female) and wondered if we, too, always moved in packs? Certainly I remember afternoons of walking the streets by myself, just for the pleasure of looking at what was around me. I went into the Paperback Exchange, where I had found my copy of Lake Woebegone Days in the bargain box under the front shelving (it still has its battered 0.25-euro-cent price tag on the back, even though pages are starting to fall out!), but didn't find any used treasures. Incidentally, Sean is reading Jane Eyre right now, a book I first read in Florence because someone had left it on the shelf in the apartment, along with Our Town, which made me cry buckets. I will always be fond of Florence, but there's a weird sense of the ghosts of the past lingering--an effect that I'm sure it doesn't have for Carla, who lived there as a real adult, much like being on Fairfield's campus lost any nostalgic pull once I was there regularly as an instructor.
On the drive back to Rome, which took about five hours, we stopped at an overlook and could see a crenellated tower in the distance. We drove that way and found a medieval fortress that had once belonged to a local robber-bandit, Ghino di Tacco, later dubbed the Italian Robin Hood. It was a stormy sort of day, and the wind on top of this mountain was incredible. The far side of the fortress was like a physical hand buffeting you backwards--stronger, I think, than even what we felt at Chauteauneuf-du-Pape! I tried to take a video on my camera of Sean laughing hysterically as he could barely move, but alas, it didn't work, and I almost dropped the damn thing on the stones.
More bad weather awaited us in Naples last weekend! The Academy sponsored a trip to Pompeii led by a fellow who has excavated there for more than a decade. I've only been to Pompeii once before (and Herculaneum, on a separate visit), and that was with Sarah last year, who took us through her research on the brothel as rain fell on the site, happily reducing the flow of tourists to a trickle. Sarah repeatedly commented on how empty the site was and how this never, ever happened...and boy, did we get to see how true that was! The streets were fairly full, and since the streets of Pompeii are insanely difficult to actually walk on--with the giant basalt paving stones that are no longer really near each other, making it more of a hike than a stroll--it was pretty intense. We managed to squeeze into the brothel, Sean and I, but most of the group gave it up since it was so crowded.
A smaller group of us stayed behind in Naples for the weekend. We had rented an AirBnb in the center, not far from the Duomo, which was certainly, um, the full Naples experience--a dimly lit alley, a stairwell that was dirty, with peeling paint, paper-thin walls that let us hear all the wails of a nearby child, and a window looking out onto a decrepit excavation site with trash thrown into it. The apartment itself was totally clean and remodeled in the Ikea style I look for in Airbnbs, but outside it was a different world. It poured so hard on Saturday that Sean and I didn't even go out to the archaeological museum until 4 in the afternoon; returning soaked, I promised him that we'll go to Naples again in the spring sometime, and we'll get a hotel! S
ean was not quite as enamored of Naples as I, but he acknowledged that there was a vitality there that is very much different in character than what you find in any of the northern cities; in many places it's really not even there. That doesn't mean I wasn't disgusted by the level of filth I saw, though, especially down some side streets, where it was ankle deep. That shouldn't be acceptable in a first-world nation, in one of its largest cities! I doubt that even the poorest parts of New York are THAT filled with trash and filth, even though we can't claim to be much better about ameliorating the effects of poverty on the young.
Our next trip will be at the beginning of November, to Berlin! I've never been to Germany, so this is exciting, as well as intimidating, considering the language barrier.