Notes in Italian: Arriving in Florence
May 6th, 2008 Posted in Hotels, Notes in Italian, Travel | No Comments »These are notes and journal entries from my trip to and around Italy in November 2004. Sorry for the inconsistent tenses. But these really are just notes.
I knew there would be issues. Other than cycling or having the time to walk, there is no better way to travel through Tuscany — as with any countryside — than by car. Plane? Worthless. Train? A little better than plane, but still, it’s best to be under your own power and guidance. Still, there are moments when driving a car in a foreign country for the first time can prove somewhat problematic. Case in point: Florence. Firenze, if you’re nasty. The capital of the Renaissance. Ground zero for the revolution in art and thinking that finally propelled Europe out of the Dark Ages and into something with considerably fewer illiterate peasants in burlap sacks poking around in the mud. And like many old, old cities, it was crisscrossed with roads that were useful several hundred years ago but today prove rather on the challenging side to navigate.
Getting from Siena to Florence was simple enough and quite a nice drive with the sun slowly setting behind rolling hills. And heck, getting into Florence was pretty easy, too. You just follow the traffic over the bridge. We had no particular plan in mind, and no hotel room booked for the night, but I had a couple decent looking spots marked in the guide, and we figured on staying at whichever one of them we happened to find first. In the meantime, we were getting a nice, if somewhat random and directionless, driving tour of Florence, including the hulking duomo at the center of town and San Croce Cathedral, the birthplace of the concept of the Stendahl Syndrome, which we’ll get to later. Having found both the big church and the main train station, I figured we were in good shape for managing to find our way to wherever we decided to stay.
We decided on a place called the Pensione Bellavista, which was supposed to be cheap but very nice, with balconies that overlook the cathedral. After an hour or so of driving around in circles and, on at least two occasions, ending up back on the other side of the Arno River, it started to sink in that what looked easy on a map was greatly complicated by Florence’s Byzantine labyrinth of microscopic side streets and randomly assigned one-way designations that sometimes, I would swear, marked the same block of street one-way in opposite directions, depending on which side from which you entered.
As we seemed destined in life to drive endlessly in a circle around the Piazza del Duomo, we decided to alter our plans and pick a hotel within that vicinity. Hey! Via Roma turns into Via Camilla, and then you just hang a right onto Via Porta Rossa, and there you are! Hotel Dali, which was also supposed to be nice and offered free parking in their enclosed courtyard. Perfect! Except that, once again, the lunatic system of one-way streets kept diverting us, farther and farther, spiraling out of control. For a good half hour, once we found our way back to Piazza del Duomo, we were completely lost within sight of the hotel’s sign! But there was no way to get there, as the street was one way in the opposite direction no matter which direction we approached it from. Eventually, with my nerves uncharacteristically starting to fray a bit around the edges, I just slammed the car into reverse and drove backwards down the narrow street — a trick I learned from a parking attendant was actually quite common in Florence.

Thus arrived somewhat ass-first at the Hotel Dali, we were faced with another challenge: the entrance to their parking area was one street down, on the opposite side of the building. Throwing my hands up toward yon tumultuous heavens, I cursed Jupiter and all the gods who mocked me and swore I would, though but a mortal, one day have my vengeance. Surely this system of streets had been designed by Machiavelli himself. And yet, the temptation — how hard could it be to go straight, make a left, then make another left? It made sense to me. If this street was one-way in X direction, surely the street down would be one-way in Y direction, where Y was the direction I needed to travel to get to the sweet, sweet haven of the parking area. I am, by and large, a man weak in the face of temptation. So I drove. And half an hour later, I was back to cursing Jupiter and all those who toyed with mankind for their twisted divine amusement.
Eventually, I found my way back to the correct street, and this time, somehow, even though it was as far as I could tell the exact same approach as the first time, I was able to drive down the street in the proper direction. Having been primed by several years in New York, at this point, I simply pulled the car up onto the sidewalk and sent Ellie in to arrange our lodgings before it got so late that no one would want to give us a room. And if possible, perhaps whoever was running the place could tell us how the hell to get to the parking area.

“Si, it is a bit confusing,” Marco explained. Marco ran the hotel with his wife. He was a young, good-looking guy, she was a young, good-looking chick, and both of them heaped pity upon us. As we settled our bill for our stay in Florence — all in cash, up front, which meant we burned through a hunk of our cash right then and there — Marco took the car key and performed some sort of sinister voodoo that allowed him to navigate the car into the courtyard, where it rested blissfully next to a Mini Cooper and would not be moved until we left Florence.
We got a jumbo nice room for the night, though we’d have to move to a smaller room the next day to make room for someone who had reservations. No worries. All I wanted was a shower and possibly some food, though I was betting the latter would be difficult to come by as it was getting late and we both knew the Italians loved to close up shop as quickly and as often as possible. Plus, various guidebooks had warned us that the left-leaning city of Florence was big on lazy Commie labor, so you were less likely than usual to be able to get anything done.
Luckily, we found a Middle eastern walk-in restaurant and ate the single best lamb gyro I have had in my entire life, and buddy, I can eat some lamb gyro.

I am a sucker for a lot of things, most of them connected to women. A pretty smile, a nice pair of legs, a bottle of bourbon. I’m also a sucker for a good cave tour, or even a bad cave tour, and if you want to read some horrifying Freudian meaning into that, be my guest. It won’t affect my enjoyment of women, liquor, or cave tours in the slightest. A grew up an easy day trip to Mammoth Cave, the biggest cave system in the world, or at least that’s the record as I remember it. And my grandfather’s farm was pock-marked with caves, many of which were large enough for a kid high on Mark Twain adventures to explore, provided they weren’t staked out by a pack of wild dogs. That I have never outgrown my fascination with caves means that, even at my more advanced age, I rarely pass up a cave tour.

For someone making the drive from east to west, hitting St. Louis is a major milestone. The traditional “gateway to the west” is marked by the St. Louis Arch (Jefferson’s monument to the notion of Manifest Destiny) and the crossing of the mighty Mississippi River. I reckon the Mississippi doesn’t have the mystique it once possessed, that mine was perhaps the last generation to be reared with familiarity of all thinks Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Mark Twain. But it is still a tremendously powerful symbol of American mythology to me, and crossing it is always an event. Plus, this was my first time crossing it on my own, driving myself west rather than riding int he back of my parents’ car.


When I was little, I always wanted to visit Santa Claus, Indiana. I assume you need not be told why a little kid would want to visit a place called Santa Claus. But for whatever reason, even though it was just down the road a spell from Louisville, I was never able to go. By 2002, though, I was a man, and like a man, I could finally actualize my dream and go visit a small town in Indiana named after a jolly fat guy who used to bring me GI Joe and Buck Rogers toys. Oh, we could also visit the Abraham Lincoln boyhood home, finally completing my “Life and Locations of Abraham Lincoln” collection (which previously included his birthplace in Kentucky, his home in Springfield, Gettysburg, the Lincoln Memorial in DC, Ford’s Theater, and his grave).
One of the great things about the road trip was that Ellie was a school teacher, meaning she had the summer off but was still collecting a paycheck, and I was a freelance writer, meaning that I could take jobs as they came and work on them during my down time. My most consistent employer was Toyfare magazine, a journal dedicated to the world of action figures and the grown men and women who should know better than to be buying them. While my friend and fellow University of Florida School of Journalism graduate, Stephanie, was busy working on the assignment that would net her her first (of what will undoubtedly be several) Pulitzer, I was writing articles about He-Man toys and who was more awesome: Starscream or Destro.
After the Piper Museum, we hit the road en route to a friend’s house in Bowling Green, Ohio. The plan for the next couple of days was to hang out with them, hit Cedar Point, go to the drive-in theater outside of Toledo, then head to Ft. Wayne for Botcon, the Transformers convention, which had Ellie mighty excited. I was going on behalf of Toyfare magazine, my current employer, to poke around and report back with a short article.
Part of what I like most about road trips are the mistakes and accidents that lead to something you did not plan on or expect to see. Case in point, our impromptu trip to the Piper Aviation Museum in Loch Haven, Pennsylvania. En route from Centralia to wherever it was we were heading (which was actually Ft. Wayne, Indiana, for a Transformers convention in a few days), we decided to search for a place to eat and sleep along Highway 20 through Pennsylvania. We ended up in Loch Haven. It looked nice enough, but unfortunately, we rolled into town late, and pretty much every restaurant we could find was closed. However, we did stumble across a flyer for a Piper Museum at the municipal airport in town, apparently the birthplace of Piper.