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Okay, I wrote this last night and am now in a little internet point in Castellina in Chianti. No time to add pictures -- they'll come later in the week. Ciao!
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Hmmm...yesterday I didn't write anything down about my day, and I've already forgotten the details. Fortunately I have photographic evidence to remind me.
Got up fairly early after kinda getting a reasonable night's sleep. Headed down the hill to get a quick breakfast:
...then check out the Museo Zoologico La Specola, which has two parts: one a ton of taxidermied critters, and the other a ton of wax sculptures used to train medical students. I was expecting it to be interesting but maybe take up 30 minutes. Two hours later I finished ogling -- this museum is incredible! It is of course a sad fact that all those animals had to die so that they could be stuffed and preserved for me to view, but what an incredible treat to get up-close views of such a vast array of life forms. There were rooms and rooms of sea critters:
(the huge squid is just resin but everything else is the real deal)
...insects
...big cats,
...gazelles
... even a huge walrus and huge rhinocerous (sorry, didn't kodak the rhino)
...then a room of lemurs (Brian)
(Aye Aye)
....monkeys and apes (but no stuffed human)
...then rooms and rooms of birds...
...and then of course the reptiles:
Not too many amphibians...just a few things and wax reproductions of cool-looking frogs (maybe they don't taxidermy very well), ending with a room of big fish, mostly sharks.
Then on to the wax anatomy sculptures, which were plentiful and fascinating. I will spare the squeamish by only revealing one pic:
(and also because I only took one -- realized there was a "no photos" sign, but I swear it was the only sign posted and was nearly at the end of the exhibit). The sculptures were very detailed and realistic, with a room dedicated to muscles, then vascular, brain and nervous system, digestion, reproduction, etc. etc. My massage guy Marty would have loved it, as he's always pointing out all my messed-up muscles but only has one anatomy dummy in his office. This place probably had a separate wax sculpture dedicated to each of the muscles that plague me -- adductor magnus, soaz, gluteous minimus, yadda yadda.
Anyhow, I blew a ton of time in this museum that apparently hardly anyone goes to. Maybe I'm the only one who thinks it's the coolest museum in Florence. Yes, there's all that incredible art. Yes, there's David (and he does take ones breath away), there's Venus (a whole bunch of them, of course, but I'm thinking of Botticelli), and all those churches decked out in a million different renditions of Jesus and his mom. But most of that stuff doesn't really move me. Looking at the marvels of nature and the intricacies of the human body are, frankly, just as moving. So there. I loved this museum so much that I wanted to by some swag, but they don't even have any! No t-shirts! No tote bags! No coffee mugs with the Aye Aye lemur on them. Damn, might have been the only souvenir for me on the whole trip. Instead I walked away in a daze, hit the little grocery store for some lunch fixins (pissed off the cashier cuz I didn't realize you're supposed to weigh and sticker your own produce), then marched back up the hill to my pad.
Made my first meal (though it was really assembling rather than cooking) of insalata with wonderful tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella, and a little pile of prosciutto (they have like 10 kinds of prosciutto at the tiny grocery store), bread (something with the word "cereali"...delicious & seemed like multigrain), and the peach that I had bought the day before at the Mercato Centrale, which I now realize I pointed to and said "1 fish, please" to the gal at the produce stand. No wonder she looked at me funny. Lunch was simple and absolutely delicious. And cheap, too -- groceries seem incredibly cheap, and everything seems to be grown/made in Italy, and each ingredient just tastes like it's supposed to taste.
After lunch I chillaxed for awhile, checked out the grounds here at the villa a little more...there's quite a bit of land for being a 30-minute walk from the Ponte Vecchio
my porch lights:
bamboo forest parking lot:
I was reading the little info book for the cottage (because I had only just found it), and there is apparently a back orchard that you can walk through, then go out the padlocked back gate and walk some narrow old road (though they all seem narrow and old to me) down to the river. Might try that in the next couple days.
Headed back into town (getting a LOT of walking done) and found another internet cafe in the terrace of the Palazzo Strozzi, which was real cozy and had outlets you could use and everything (though sadly no bathroom...you have to go into the ticket office for the Palazzo then around the bend and into an unmarked bathroom...took awhile to figure that one out). I had a nice huge Pelligrino then decided on a Negroni "old style", which was brought to me along with a whole plate of tiny little sandwiches, a dish of peanuts and what I swear was nacho cheese Doritos. They really, really reward cocktail consumption around here:
This was a good thing, too, because I suspected dinner options would be grim, as it was Sunday AND August, which is about the worst possible combination for finding a good restaurant in Florence. Nonetheless I set out to find something to eat, wandering and wandering the Duomo area and the Boboli area, and before I knew it it was nearly dark and I was back at my place with nothing to eat. Fortunately there was leftover prosciutto and pecorino, so not to worry. Spent the rest of the evening reading and working on the crossword (downloading the New York Times every Sunday while I'm away...totally addicted).
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