Took the train to Florence this morning. Uneventful. Apparently we’ve figured out how to take a train in just about any language. As usual, people were asking us directions in the station. Happens every single time.
On the train, started “The Universe in a Single Atom” by the Dalai Lama. Good stuff, which I don’t have time to go into detail about here. Suffice it to say, everyone should read this book. The man is wise.
The phrase of the day is “I had a bad experience”. This comes from some movie or another, in which people keep trying to get the character to detail said bad experience, which left him with a dislike for dogs. His response, consistently, is the above. In my case, it’s crowds of tourists, surrounded by predatory gypsies, in Italy. Look, I had a bad experience, okay?
Florence is much smaller than Rome. The howling of motorbikes is muted, and the food rocks. Tuscan cuisine is all about bold, primary flavors. For dinner this evening, Jen had Gnocci with a tomato-mint sauce (way better than it sounds!) and I had some sort of seafood pasta. The wine was a Ruffino Chianti, produced somewhere around here. No wait, they couldn’t get the Ruffino, so it was some comparable local variety. Damn good, in either case.
The high point of the day was certainly the Museum of the History of Science. This is a recent addition, where they’ve done a great job with a large collection of basic science implements from the 16th century on. I maintain my assertion that I would have made an awesome scientist in the 1700’s. The highlights were two of Galileo’s telescopes (like, the ones that he used to see the moons of Jupiter), and an Armillary sphere more than two meters high. For reference, armillary spheres were the hugely complex mechanical contraptions used to implement (and prop up) the Earth centered model of the heavens. Seeing them sitting next to simple, predictive models of the Sun centered version, it was totally easy to see (a) which is correct (b) why the solar version won.
Other than that, we walked our feet off again. The Duomo, with its green marble facade, the Boboli gardens, and all that Jazz. Tomorrow, the plan is to get up early enough to beat the lines to Michelangelo’s David. The man created David at age 26. He sculpeted the Pieta at age 22. It’s enough to make a late-blooming 30 year old weep.
Oh yeah, we also ate a merangue approximately the size of my head.
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