Tuscany!

It's Sunday morning, and I'm sitting in my room at the desk in front of the window, looking out over the red tile roofs of Siena, a thousand year old Tuscan city. Medieval church bells are ringing from all directions and the city is slowly coming to life. My room is near the town's main square, and it was lively and hopping there until well after 2 this morning, and it seems as though most people are getting a late, quiet start today. A peaceful Sunday morning is just what I would have expected from this easygoing town.

I haven't written in a few days, mostly because normally I like to write at night, and after eating dinner here, it's usually all I can do to stagger back to my hotel before lapsing into a food coma. Rather than changing my eating habits, I would much prefer to change my writing habits. :)

This will be my third full day in Siena, and prior to that I spent four days in Florence. I feel as though I've done next to nothing except soak up art, food, and sunshine for the past week. It has been wonderful and restorative.

A few days ago, I saw Michelangelo's David and his Prisoners at the Accademie in Florence, and I've visited a number of his other sculptures at the Bargello in Florence and the Duomo in Siena. I'm so glad that I read The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone a few years ago. It's a fantastic novel about the life of Michelangelo, and it helped me appreciate sculpture and understand more about the creative and physical process involved in realizing it. It's physically difficult (especially when he reached his eighties, it must have been very hard to hack away at rock with a hammer and chisel), and one wrong move or one flaw in the marble can destroy years' worth of work. And it was so slow--that's why the body of work of sculptors is often so small. Sometimes it took him three years just to polish a sculpture. I loved learning that Michelangelo didn't regard himself as a "creator" of his sculptures: he believed that God put the figures in the marble,
and Michelangelo's role was simply to chip away what didn't belong. Besides lending insight into Michelangelo and sculpture as an art form, the book also did a tremendous job of explaining the church politics of the time and Florentine and Roman society. Seeing David is quite an experience no matter what, but having that bit of background made the experience much richer for me than it would have been otherwise.

The statue of David stood guard outside the main doors of Florence's city hall for hundreds of years, but eventually the original moved to a special museum designed to display it, and a copy of the statue now stands where the original used to be. Italian politics have always been rowdy, and there were frequent protests and brawls outside the city hall. David was evacuated from his original perch after somebody threw a bench out a window during one of the protests, knocking off David's left arm. In fact, that wasn't the only time he was injured; after being placed in the Accademie for safekeeping, sometime in the 1990s, a deranged man took a hammer to David and whacked away at his feet, and some of the damage is visible. Now David is in his special museum and protected by a glass partition. Something similar happened to his Pieta in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, in fact, and that statue is also behind protective glass now too.

The glass doesn't diminish the impact of David, though. Viewing the statue is a spectacular reveal. From the museum's entrance, you turn a corner into a long, beautifully proportioned white room lined with other works of Michelangelo, and your eye is immediately fixated on David because he stands at the far end of the room, high above the crowd, underneath a glass dome. The light streaming in from the dome makes him look a little like he's glowing from within. I've read conflicting accounts: some sources say he's 14 feet tall and others say 17, but whichever it is, he is massive. And the impact is hard to describe. It captures the moment when David is clutching the stone, contemplating Goliath. Everything about the form communicates: his relaxed and watchful posture, the oversized hands (which are supposed to be the hands of God), the scale, and especially the expression on David's face, which appears confident at most angles, but from one side there's a quiver in his eyebrow that betrays concern.

For me, the only experience comparable to seeing David was seeing Picasso's Guernica in Madrid. Guernica was a city in Spain that became the first civilian target for arial bombing, and Picasso's enormous canvas grabs you by the throat with its message about war and senseless brutality. David is much subtler, and it's almost as though its restraint is the seat of its emotional power. Both of them seize the eye and don't let go, and I will never forget either of them.

As much as I love the visual arts here in Tuscany, the culinary arts are tough to beat, especially in the summertime. I have been eating some of the best meals of my life for the past week. Normally I eat something quick for lunch (a small panini with prosciutto, mozzarella, and basil, for example) and then have a nice sit-down meal in the evening. For the past two nights, I've had pici, a fat Tuscan spaghetti that is a bit smaller than the diameter of a pencil. The night before last, I tried it with parmesan, butter and vegetables, and last night I had it with tomatoes and unsmoked bacon (let's be honest: with pig fat). Both dishes were out of this world, and I think that I can probably imitate them at home if I can get my hands on some pici (does anybody know where I can find it in the States?). In Florence, I was thrilled to find a fantastic restaurant hidden away from the hordes of tourists and filled only with people speaking Italian. I ate
there twice, and it was inexpensive and perfectly captured the essence of Tuscan food: simple dishes made with great, fresh, in-season ingredients.

Yesterday, since I had been staying in a guesthouse with an open kitchen, I bought tomatoes and zucchini and prepared my own lunch. Before this trip, I sometimes found it irritating to listen to people who had traveled to Italy moan in rapture about the tomatoes there. Well, I've been moaning in rapture about the tomatoes on a daily basis here. I bought three different kinds of tomatoes at the produce stand, and I cut up the best pieces into a bowl to eat with olive oil and salt. Heaven! They were blood red and sunburned straight through to the middle, and velvety inside instead of mealy. I also picked up a type of zucchini that I see everywhere here that I never find at home: it's pale green and white and has a weird sharp fuzz on the outside, and it was almost as hard as a carrot when I chopped it. I sauteed it in olive oil and salt for a long time, letting it turn golden brown, and then I added some more tomatoes and balsamic. Wow. WOW. I
would eat that meal every day of my life and would never tire of it. :)

Oh, man, and the gelato! Don't get me started. :) I've been eating it daily, always choosing two flavors per cup. So far, the combination I've liked best was lemon and a red gelato made from raspberries and cherries. But the pistachio and caramel is terrific too. I might need a support group when I get home and my supply is cut off.

All right, I have successfully made myself hungry, and now I'm going to go get cleaned up and then find something for lunch. Is it just me or has this blog revolved around food a lot more than one would expect? First the lack of great food in Morocco, now the embarrassment of riches in Italy. Ha, I'm writing my own Agony and Ecstasy.

Until tomorrow, ciao!