Florence, Italy: The Heat is On

Heat is a wonderful and terrible thing. It has the ability to cook but also to burn. The appliances that give it have capacity to warm a room but also split open the back of the head. Today’s theme: the heat is on.

For about two weeks in October, I was on a countdown to today. In those weeks, Florence was overcast, rainy, and our apartment was freezing. Often the air outside was warmer than the air in our stone-walled apartment. All we could do was bundle up in extra layers of clothes and blankets and wait for today. Since Italy imports most of its energy, it only allows heat into apartments after a certain date. Today they switched it on. As haywire as most weather is this decade, now is the time when Florence doesn’t need it. We’re in the upper-60s (fahrenheit) and most of the time don’t need jackets.

A great thing about getting the heat: we get to talk to our landlady and her husband more. They live in the apartment right across the hall and the husband came over this morning asking us what hours of the day we wanted heat. It turns out that he was able to install an automatic timer that would turn on and shut off the radiators in certain hours of the day. I told him when we had classes and he set it so that the heat should turn on right once we return. It’s nice having a handy neighbor.

I’ve also had a dilemma ever since I arrived. Our oven has never really worked. The stove-top range has worked great (I heat pasta at least every other day), but the oven never cooks anything. I tried to make a lasagna almost three weeks ago and it took an hour and 45 minutes to cook (and it still wasn’t fully cooked). Two weeks ago I tried to make sugar cookies. They never turned into a solid form.

Tonight I tried lasagna again. If the oven wouldn’t cooperate, I knew I could talk to my landlady since I’d already talked to her twice. Sure enough, after I had the lasagna prepared and ready for the oven, I checked and it wasn’t preheating. I went and knocked and explained it in my broken Italian. She came, saw the problem, turned the dials a lot and then said it was broken. She pulled out a little convection oven and showed me how it might work. Then she checked the big oven again and it was heating. I don’t know how she did it, but her style for fixing things is like mine for computers: try messing with a bunch of things until something changes. In the end, it still took a long time to cook, but the lasagna turned out great.

Besides all of the literal heat – I’m feeling the pressure of finishing out my last semester. It would be so easy to coast the rest of the time I’m here. Then I wouldn’t enjoy it as much.