The Curse is Broken!

I left Rome for Florence today, and as soon as I crossed the city line out of Rome, things started getting better, as though somebody had put a hex on me that was effective only inside the city limits. I took the local train, which cuts a relaxed four-hour path through Tuscany and Umbria, stopping at all the little towns. The fast train completes the whole journey in 90 minutes, but this is the beauty of not packing a whole vacation into a week or two--I don't have to be in a rush. Instead, I got to enjoy the scenery and get a peek at all the villages on the rail line. And Tuscany and Umbria really deliver on that score. Rolling hills, mountains in the distance, great fields of sunflowers in full bloom, poplar and olive trees swaying in the breeze, and giant mounds of hay freshly rolled up into big round stacks. What could be more beautiful?

Even better than the trip here was the utter lack of drama upon arrival. In Morocco, I got used to spending an anguished hour or so wandering around on foot in every new city, helpless, with a useless map with no street names, searching through streets with no signs, asking people in broken Arabic whether they've ever heard of my hotel, worried that if they hadn't, I'd end up sleeping on the ground in the souk with the feral cats. Without fail, it used to take two or three or four people's directions to get me anywhere close, although admittedly I always did finally reach my destination.

But here! There are accurate maps of Florence! With actual street names. I was able to give a taxi driver my hotel's address, and he just BROUGHT me here. Shocking--I'm so far ahead of the game I don't even know what to do! I'm clearly going to have to find some other form of entertainment. :)

Not only that, but my hotel has a great concierge who whipped out a map and within minutes gave me the download on good restaurants, where to buy a SIM card, who sells the best gelato, where to watch the sun set, and how to beat the lines at the various museums. People like that are worth their weight in gold. And his advice, particularly about the restaurants and the gelato, was flawless.

Map in hand, I set out for an initial exploration of Florence, and it took me all of about two minutes to fall in love. I was walking towards the center of the city when I passed a corner and suddenly, unexpectedly, the Duomo was revealed. Just like that. It caught me completely off guard. I took a lap around it and then continued through much of the rest of the city center, checking out the Ponte Vecchio and a couple of the other bridges, and the part of the city south of the river. Florence is lovely and walkable and not nearly as crowded as I had feared. There are a lot of people here, to be sure, but it's humming and lively, not jammed and chaotic and stressful.

On the concierge's recommendation, I stopped for dinner at a little place along the Palazzo Pitti and took his advice to skip the pasta and head straight for the meat and poultry. Tuscany isn't really known for its pasta--its niche is rustic, simple food made with fresh, local ingredients. I ordered the Caprese salad and the lemon chicken, which were both fabulous. As usual, the waiter brought me condiments for my Caprese salad--olive oil, salt, and balsamic vinegar. But here's something I've never seen before: the balsamic vinegar was in a diffuser bottle, like that butter substitute or the salad dressing with the spray cap. It's a brilliant way to serve balsamic vinegar because the taste is so strong that you don't necessarily want a puddle of it, just an essence. When your mozzarella accidentally falls off the fork into a puddle of balsamic, forget about tasting any cheese, right? The only thing sadder than that are those birds that get covered with crude oil when a tanker runs aground. This new serving method can prevent senseless mozzarella carnage. Yay!!! I plan to adopt the balsamic diffuser spray innovation as soon as I get back to my own kitchen. Be careful if you try it at home, though--I wasn't paying attention to where I shot it once, and I got it all over my face. Oh well. ;)

After the Caprese came the lemon chicken, which was so good that even the chicken's mom couldn't have objected to it. It was a filet pounded very thin, lightly fried and in a simple sauce that seemed to be olive oil, maybe a little butter, either veal or chicken stock, lots of lemon juice, a bit of white wine, little if any garlic, and just a bit of salt and pepper. But it was fantastic--I would have taken a bath in the sauce. And I totally intend to experiment with the recipe concept at home.

With dinner finished, I took a stroll and as usual helped a handful of people who wanted pictures. A Japanese guy Kazia and I struck up a conversation after the picture, and it was such a cool chance encounter. He's an artist living in NYC who paints and sketches and sculpts and has public art pieces up in a number of major cities in the US, including DC. He spends every other summer in Italy, and he showed me his sketchbook, which was breathtaking. He gave me some great advice for where to go to get good pictures, and then he set off to sketch some more and I set off to take nighttime pictures.

In one respect the crowds in Florence are wonderful: because there's plenty of foot traffic (but not too much of it), I felt perfectly at ease walking around with my camera after dark, which usually makes me too nervous. I love photographing neon signs, so I did that for awhile and then headed back to the hotel.

Which brings us to the present. At this moment, I'm sitting at a small desk in front of a large open window overlooking a piazza in Florence. It's 2 am and dark except for the streetlights, a handful of store signs, and tail lights of the cars and motorcycles below. It's still warm, but there's a cool, wet breeze rushing in from the screenless window, and I can't imagine where I would be happier right now.

The curse of Roma is broken. I am free. :)