And Now...ROME!

my dearest brother,

(i accidentally wrote 'bother' and then corrected myself.  i'm sure freud would have some choice thoughts on that.  or, perhaps, my typing teacher.)

we have arrived safely in rome!  but before that, we were in florence!  we're in italy now!

so - florence was cool.  as per my usual refrain, i would have liked to have a bit more time there, but we did get a lot of wandering around done, and had some nice meals/time to sit and watch people.

our first day we went to the uffizi gallery, which is a museum that was built in the 1500s (although i think originally it was government offices or something equally un-glamorous) and has a frickin' enormous collection of art - including piles of renaissance art that you don't know you know, and lots that you do know you know (like the birth of venus and da vinci's annunciation).  it also has exactly a trillion statues. 

like most of these 'greatest museums in the world', i'm finding that it's just impossible to take everything in.  you need multiple trips to each place just to see anything in any kind of meaningful way.  after we wandered through the museum for about 3 1/2 hours, we decided to leave, and then proceeded to speed through another 20 rooms FULL of amazing stuff that we barely glanced at. 

so - my latest pledge to myself is to spend my time at these places really taking in the parts that i do see, and not worrying about 'seeing it all' while i'm there.  i'd much rather go through three rooms and feel like i've really registered all the extraordinary things, than seeing thirty rooms and barely remembering any of it.  yes - i realize that this is an extension of my previous pledge to not beat myself up for not seeing everything in each city, but it is a subset of said, previous pledge.

on that same theme, we went to the duomo yesterday, which is another sort of super-famous-famous-place-that-i-don't-know-anything-about-except-it's-famous.  (for any sticklers reading this:) duomo is actually just another name for a cathedral (or maybe for things that were a cathedral at one point?), and there are loads of them all over the place.  the one in florence is one of the most famous, but it's actual name is saint mary of the something (flower, maybe?)  it was built starting in the 1200s on top of another, older church. they still have some of the pieces of that older church, but you had to pay extra to go through the basement with the remains, and a few broken pieces of stone just didn't feel worth 5 euros - call me cynical.

Ennyway - the buildings were beautiful (there are actually a few buildings together that are all made of this white/green/pinkish marble), and inside were some lovely floors and statues, and an amazing dome, but it was impossible to get any sense of the place, because there were these huge crowds of people going through. 

it was interesting, because there were lots of crowds at other cathedrals we've been to, but at this one, the main feeling was of everybody wanting to get it checked off the list.  they just kind of walked quickly around the interior snapping a few pictures and then quickly walked out.  the place itself had no feeling of calm or spirituality or anything.  both megan and i were struck by how uninterested everyone seemed.  and these were the people who Paid to get into the place!

(also, i remember in the musical assassins, sara jane moore tells lee harvey oswald that after he kills president kennedy, a woman in florence leaped (lept?  leapt?) from the duomo clutching a picture of the president and cursing his name.  don't know if that's actually true, but it makes for great musical theater.)

we also went up a big hill to the michelangelo square (thank you kathy!) to see an amazing panorama of florence.  i tried to take some pictures to really impress everyone, but i fear it wasn't happening.  everyone will just have to look at the ten thousand other pictures of florence that already exist. 

at the center of the square is a huge reproduction of michelangelo's david. 

here's another ugly merry grissom secret:  i just don't think david is that interesting.  it looks remarkably like every other statue of a naked guy from that era.  in fact, he seems less interesting than many because there's no movement to him.  i don't get it.  don't tell anyone.

still -the view was gorgeous.  after that we headed back to do some research on where to eat dinner.  after a whole bunch of deeply unsatisfying meals, we've learned to ask around and look online to find places to eat.  i think we both sort of went into the trip thinking that if you can afford to keep a restaurant open in france or italy, you probably know how to cook. 

we were really, really wrong. 

i'll save the food rant for another time, but please rest assured that we have started doing our due diligence and have had much better luck on the food front.

there were no other major florence happenings.  i was a little surprised that the ponte vecchio (again, you're just gonna have to go with me on these spellings) is basically a long bridge full of jewelry stores.  also, there was one place we tried to get in to on both days, but we managed to arrive five minutes before closing both times.  (the first day we got there 5:30ish, so the second day we made sure to arrive around noon only to discover that day they were closing at 12:30 and were no longer letting people in.)

also, one of my favorite things we did while we were there was on a slightly different cultural tip.  at the flagship ferragamo store (ferragamo is a very famous maker of very lovely, expensive shoes) they have a ferragamo museum in the basement which just happened to be having an exhibit of marilyn monroe's shoes and clothing.  he made lots of shoes for her.  they also had lots of additional material (photos, news and film clips, excerpts from her journals) and pieces of art that place some of the images in a larger cultural/artistic context.

anyway - it was a really great exhibit.  i have pictures of a lot of her clothes and shoes because i bought the catalog when sotheby's auctioned off her possessions a bunch of years ago, but it's always interesting to see things in person.  also, there's something so (i can't think of the right word.  poignant is the closest i can come up with) about seeing someone's things.  the scuffs on their shoes, the wrinkled spots on their clothes.  we were wishing there were more of her sort of everyday clothes - capris and blouses, rather than just her costumes and evening gowns, but it is wonderful to see something that i've looked at hundreds of pictures of over the years (the white dress she wore in her first married photo shoot with miller, the 'seven year itch' dress, etc.) things look so different when you can see the textures and colors.

i felt like the art portion was a bit less satisfying.  i truly believe that marilyn was a Genius when it came to living in front of a camera (moving or stills), but it feels like a bit of a stretch to say she's purposely aligned herself with the horizon on the beach to re-interpret botticelli's venus.  i think it's pretty much she was tying her sweater and bending her knee to make her leg look thinner.

but that's just me.

if you're still with me after that twenty paragraphs, congrats - you get the yogi button.  i'll try to post pictures soon.  so far the wireless here in rome is going gangbusters.  (although i don't know what that means, really, but you know what i mean.)

sending love!