Florence, Italy: Family Visit

My family just left. My parents and brother arrived around 12:30 in the afternoon on Sunday. Proving once again why I should check e-mails at least once a day (including the two days before), they arrived three hours later than I was originally expecting them. Their plane left Des Moines late, causing them to be rerouted on all of the flights. To miss a flight but still make it three hours after originally planning was pretty good. That morning I did the early mass at St. James and then waited.

When they got here, they were jet-lagged. Remembering how much my body hated me when I first arrived in Florence, I had sympathy aches for them. Luke was especially in bad shape since he’d done the midnight showing of Harry Potter the night before they left. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

We had originally wanted to see the soccer game that afternoon. Fiorentina played AC Milan in Florence. We weren’t able to get tickets; they sold out, but some of the Milan fans didn’t come — so there was a little room. Still, the stadium had 44,000 people in it. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t make it there. We did find a way to see the game, nevertheless, since the Casa del Popolo in the nearby town of Fiesole was projecting it onto one of their walls. Below is the family with the nice sunset-lit Fiesole hills behind them:

The game was fun (Fiorentina won 3-1), but they were WAY too tired for watching. When we left we took the bus back to Florence and went to their hotel.

One of the struggles I have as a tour guide is fitting to the others’ schedules. I am now thinking like a Florentine. Dinner before 8pm is extremely rare. At 5:45, though, the family was hungry and nothing was open (it was a Sunday)! They all ended up taking naps and we had two pizzas later in the night. Luke thought it was some of the best pizza he’d ever had in his life; I thought it was barely mediocre.

Monday morning started with a sunless sky with VERY cold weather. My dad had been starting to feel sick when he first arrived and he had a fever on Monday morning; for most of the week he was feeling sick. He stayed in bed that morning and my brother and mom came with me to my Art History site visit. We went to the Casa Buonarotti and saw some of Michelangelo’s first works. The tour would have been boring at any other time for them; with Dr. Reynolds, though, I’m pretty sure they enjoyed the “detailed” explanations she gave. After class I introduced them to one of my favorite parts of Florence: Lucca. Gianlucca is my baker at the end of my street who makes some of the best pizza and breads. After choosing a couple of kinds, we went back to their hotel room and ate with my dad.

One of the challenges for the week was balancing my class schedule with their schedule. On Mondays I have 5.5 hours of class; needless to say, it got in the way of spending time with my family. My Italian class also decided that afternoon that we were splitting this week’s exam into two separate days. The trip I’d planned with the family to Siena on Wednesday was quickly scrapped. In the end, it was fine since we came up with more to do in Florence. Monday night we ate dinner at a restaurant I like: La Maddia. This restaurant was recommended by a friend from TCU who studied in Florence last Fall; they have some of the best lasagna. The came dessert: Italian gelato. That trip to the gelateria brought on a ritual joke through the week; my dad, still not feeling great, asked me what gelato was when I recommended it for dessert. My brother and mom each did the reaction so I didn’t have to.

Tuesday was another busy day. I had a presentation I gave in my International Politics class, so my mind was always working double-time; it was always planning the next thing to do with the family and also always concentrating on organizing the presentation points. We started out the morning going to “the rock museum.” This workshop/museum is actually of semi-precious stones that are fashioned into incredibly ornate fixtures. Some are tables. Some are jewelry chests. Some are vases. Some are painting replicas for walls. I think the family enjoyed it, but they weren’t as excited about it as I originally was. This trip I wasn’t as excited either since I had my camera and my new lens but the staff told me I couldn’t take any pictures.

That afternoon we chilled since I only had a short time before my Italian class. Tuesday night was the treat: cooking at Mike’s. My family had heard about Mike before they arrived, but letting them meet him AND make a great dinner with him was one of the best things their trip could include. I’m not going to talk about how great Mike was at describing the dishes or great the food was — a simple menu will say enough: Penne with zuchini, tomatoes and garlic cooked in a white wine; a pork fillet rolled with spinach, mushrooms and wrapped and baked in prosciutto; pears poached in wine with a marsala cream sauce (think egg nog but better). OK, enough said.

Wednesday morning my dad was feeling sick again. My mom and brother and I went and saw the Churches of San Lorenzo and Santa Croce. These two are nice, but not my favorites in town. San Lorenzo has an unfinished facade at the front and during the week we called it “the ugly church.” Besides the rough stone on the front, nothing about it is ugly. Santa Croce, on the other hand, is being restored in several places inside and it doesn’t look nearly as good as San Lorenzo. The facade at the front is nice (and finished), but the interior is darker, cluttered and generally older than San Lorenzo. After seeing those two churches, we grabbed sandwiches at a place near my school called the Oil Shoppe. Then came my Italian conversation test. I think it went well, but then again, I’ve thought most of my tests have gone well; we’ll see on Tuesday how the teacher thought it went. Dinner on Wednesday night was at a restaurant near San Lorenzo: Za-za’s. I’d never eaten there, but several friends had recommended it.

Thursday was the last full day my family was in town. We started by going to the Piazzale Michelangelo and doing a family picture for the Christmas cards. Then we went up to my favorite church in Florence: San Miniato. I’ve described it before, but this Benedictine church on a hill has so much simplicity compared to some churches. The inside has frescoes and a complicated architecture; still, it’s crypt is so plain yet wonderful. The lighting is dark and the atmosphere of the area is one of reflective marble. My favorite spot in the church is the steps at the back of the crypt before the entrance to the chapel.

Going back into town we grabbed pizza slices for lunch and made it to the Uffizi gallery. I never knew I could go through an art gallery so fast. For the amount of stuff that’s in the Uffizi, we spent an embarrassingly short time in there. They wanted to see the highlights, which we definitely did! When doing the tour I thought we were going WAY too fast; but, there’s something to be said for going through a gallery fast for the first time. If it’s arranged chronologically, the short walk through shows the progression of the methods and the development of art in general. Things from the previous room are still forefront in the mind. Sometimes fast really is better; sometimes slow is better too. If you have a chance to go through a gallery, do it fast the first time, come back in a week, and spend four times the amount in there you did before.

After another Italian test came another phenomenal dinner. Acqua al 2, a restaurant highly recommended by friends (and started by one of the founders of the Culinary Institute in Florence), was SO good. My dad, brother and I all had the same thing for our first course: assaggio. They have five first dishes that they bring out and let us share and sample. I loved them all
; Luke’s reactions, though, were the highlight of the night. It turns out that Luke isn’t a fan of gnocchi or risotto. The gnocchi was the fourth plate they brought out; Luke gave me his and said “I’m trading this for a fifth-round draft pick” (meaning he wanted first pick and a bigger quantity of whatever came out next). Sure enough, the risotto came out as dish number five. Luke doesn’t do rice, so this was priceless. He looked at us, my mom and I couldn’t hold in the laughter, and he said, “ok, the draft pick still counts for whatever’s coming next”. He didn’t use it since we all had great dishes for the meat course. My mom and Luke had steaks with blueberry sauce; I had a steak with a great Balsamic sauce. My dad had chicken (and some of Luke’s blueberry sauce). After my mom had dessert, we still went out for gelato and ended the night.

They left in a taxi for the airport a couple of hours ago and I’m going to miss them. Luckily, I go home in two and a half weeks. The next three months will all be incredibly crazy and busy with me all over the country. Still, it will be nice to return to that side of the ocean and too see even more family members than the three who came over.