The Great Continental Gallivant, Part the First: Florence

As you might have known (although you probably didn’t), students at the University of Innsbruck have the entire month of February as winter break. Naturally, for we in the Innsbruck Program, this length of time off means but one thing: travel like crazy. On or around January 29th (our first day of break) all of the students in the program scattered to the four points of the compass and the four in between. This month, we (though not necessarily me) will be traveling from Dublin to Cairo, Athens to Paris, Rome to Berlin. This post and the eight following it will describe my own hectic travels, which lasted 23 days and which took me in a great loop through Italy, Malta, and Greece.
My itinerary, as it finally resolved itself (sometimes in a panicky and last-minute manner), worked out so:
January 29th to February 1st: Florence, Italy
February 1st to February 6th: Rome, Italy
February 6th to February 9th: the island of Malta
February 9th to February 10th: back in Rome
February 10th to February 16th: Athens, Greece
February 16th to February 17th: 18 hours of hectic traveling trying to get back to Innsbruck
February 18th to February 20th: Vienna
In this blog, I shall record my experiences, observations, and petty witticisms, and in general chronicle what I have dubbed the Great Continental Gallivant.
Pictures are, as the saying goes, worth a thousand words at least, and I have at least a thousand pictures for your. You will find them at picasaweb.google.com/zerstorer.von.welten . If you’ve never been to this site before, it contains all of the pictures I have taken in Europe, as well as some from back in the States. It would behoove you to bookmark the site or otherwise make note of it, because I will be referencing it constantly during the course of these entries.
And now, without any more gilding the lily and with no further ado, I shall begin with Florence, the gem of Tuscany and center of the Renaissance. Florence rose to power during the 14th century as a center of banking and trade, helped by the powerful Medici family, who, in addition to being fabulously, obscenely wealthy, were great patrons of the arts, sciences, and learning.
Florence is of course best known for its role in the Renaissance, where it played host to the creation and invention of so many classic treasures of that time: the dome built on a large scale, the works of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and many other Renaissance artists, too many to be enumerate here.
I traveled to Florence with five friends. We would remain together throughout most of Italy, and I would rejoin three of them for my time in Greece. We had originally planned to leave for Florence very early indeed, departing Innsbruck at 5:30 am and arriving in Florence in the early afternoon. The night before we abandoned that option in favor of taking slower, cheaper trains. Thus we left Innsbruck at 11 am on January 29th, traveling first to Brenner, a town close to the Austrian-Italian border. The ride to Brenner was itself noteworthy, since the rail line wends its way through a deep alpine valley, past small villages and under massive bridges. The morning was bright and clear, and the countryside was stunning. At Brenner, we changed trains and boarded one heading south to Bologna. Those hours were spent in reading, napping, and occasional conversation. The train was quite empty until we reached Trent, about 4 hours into the journey, when it filled with the evening’s commuters heading home to Bologna.
After arriving in Bologna, we changed to our final train heading to Florence, arriving in that city at around 10pm. We trudged through the mostly empty streets to the hostel where we stayed at, which proved to be quite comfortable: our room was an apartment with extra beds, with a balcony providing a nice view of the street behind us. After a rather late dinner, we retired and went to bed.
The next day was an exercise in speedy tourism. We arose at 7am and were out of the door by 8, heading to the Uffizi, Florence’s massive art gallery, well known for its Medieval and Early Renaissance collections, with such works as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera being among its most noteworthy. The museums building was originally an office complex for the Medicis in the 16th century hence its name (Uffizio being the Italian for ‘office’), but it soon took on the role of an art gallery, first holding the Medici’s private collections, and later transforming into a museum proper. We saw it in 2 and a half hours, which if you’ve ever been there is no mean feat. It perhaps helped that none of us were particularly interested in looking at galleries full of medieval Catholic art (and after a while most of the works started to blend together).
After we exited the Uffizi, blinking in the morning sun, we went to the Duomo, the local nickname for Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. The Duomo was originally built in the 14th century, but the dome which gives the cathedral its name was not built until the early 15th, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi determined how to construct a dome of the magnitude required without that dome collapsing under its own weight: he supported the dome independently of the roof, and built it of much lighter brick, as opposed to the three kinds of marble used to build the rest of the church.
Since the dome contains passages leading up to its cupola, it was only natural that some ingenious and anonymous Florentine conceived the idea of using the climb to the top as a tourist attraction. Our ascent to the top took us through sets of spiral staircases leading up to a high balcony just beneath the curve of the dome, where we could look down on the people inside the cathedral and view the frescoes painted underneath the dome. After that, we climbed up inside the dome itself, between the outside layer of stone and tile and the inside layer of bricks. The view from the cupola, or rather the small balcony around the cupola, was spectacular as promised, giving us a 360 view of the city and the surrounding countryside.
After we had gotten down from the dome, we entered the cathedral proper. The inside was cavernous, although compared to sights I would see later in my trip, it was only moderate inside. Of particular note are the frescoes on the interior walls, commemorating those buried inside the cathedral.
We left the Duomo and walked north to the Accademia gallery, which house Michelangelo’s David. Although the Accademia is a respectable art gallery in itself, the David is naturally the main attraction, which has the unfortunate effect of eclipsing everything else in the gallery, and of making you wonder why you paid 10 Euros to see just one thing.
We then made our way slowly to the Ponte Vecchio, the “Old Bridge” over the river Arno. The bridge is lined with buildings, erected there when it was customary to build shops and businesses along a bridge. Today the shops all house jewelry stores in a vast and sparkly multitude, with a few open places where people can look out over the brown, sluggish expanse of the Arno River. We took the time to stroll down it, before walking along the river and onto another bridge, this one more conventional. We paused there for awhile, taking pictures and basking in the early afternoon sun, before returning to our hostel to join the rest of the Florentines in a siesta.
Dinner we had in a small, hole-in-the-wall trattoria near our hostel. It was moderately priced, and quite good, and I feasted on tortellini in a meat and cheese sauce, a carpaccio of arugula and beef, and naturally bread, olive oil, and vinegar, all washed down with the house wine. We returned to the hostel, packed, and went to bed.