Entries about art

The morning of Wednesday, 13 November 2019 was yet another dismal, drizzly morning in Rome. Yet again I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about leaving my comfortable hotel room. But leave I must for I had an important date.

On Monday afternoon when I visited St Peter’s Basilica I approached a couple of Swiss Guards on sentry duty at one of the many checkpoints controlling access into Vatican City. I asked nicely if they could please spare me a ticket to the weekly audience with the Pope on Wednesday morning and they gladly obliged, giving me a little pink slip of photocopied paper. The Swiss Guards are the defence force of the State of Vatican City. They look decidedly un-martial with their baggy blue, red and yellow uniforms, berets cocked on their head, perfect grooming, smooth complexions, winsome smiles and sweet, polite demeanour. Would that all the world’s militaries were like the Swiss Guards! This planet would be a much more peaceful place.

In typical Urban Reverie fashion I arrived at the audience with Pope Francis a little bit late at about half past nine. The audience was an intimate affair, just me, His Holiness and about ten thousand other people.

On most Wednesday mornings when the Pope is in town, His Holiness will hold an audience in St Peter’s Square with the faithful and the not-so-faithful but merely curious. You need a ticket from the Swiss Guards which is free for anyone who asks. The Pope will make a speech to those assembled, his face shown on big screens for the benefit of those up the back. Portions of the speech will be translated by other priests in various languages; I recall English, German, Portuguese and Spanish being used. Most of the Pope’s speech will be only in Italian and left untranslated.

With the possible exception of Queen Elizabeth II, Pope Francis is now the most famous person I have ever seen with my own eyes. He was a long way away; a mere cream-coloured dot on a podium surrounded by black-robed priests, but I saw him nonetheless. The crowd was silent and respectful; dotted through the multitude were various national flags flown by groups of people who had come all this way just to see His Holiness – Argentina, the Philippines, the Czech Republic. About half of the immense expanse of St Peter’s Square was occupied by the audience.

I must admit I was slightly disappointed. I sort of half-expected that the majesty of the moment would fill me with reverence and awe while I would be struck by a lightning bolt from Pentecostal skies like what happened to St Paul on the road to Damascus and God Himself would say to me in a booming voice, “Urban, my dear child, give up thy sinful ways and follow my path of righteousness!” Instead I spent most of my time wiping the drizzle off my glasses with my handkerchief, trying to decipher Pope Francis’s Italian – the Duolingo course only got me so far – and wondering when the speech would ever end.

The audience did finally come to a close; the Pope led the crowd through the Lord’s Prayer in Latin – the text was helpfully printed on the back of my ticket – and His Holiness blessed the crowd, also in Latin. The audience had the opportunity to meet the Pope afterwards; many had brought along religious items such as Bibles and Rosary beads to be blessed by Pope Francis, but I was getting wet and hungry so I went off to a nearby municipal covered market to marvel at all the amazing fresh produce and have some lunch.

I had booked a ticket to the Vatican Museums for the half past twelve slot. I joined the long queue and was granted entry. The next five hours were a blur. The sheer amount of art, sculpture, architecture, artefacts – it was too much to take in. It was far more overwhelming than the Uffizi in Florence. The Vatican Museums are dizzying; I passed from gallery to gallery, corridor to corridor, courtyard to courtyard and only remember little bits of it, there was far too much for one brain to absorb in just one day.

Note that the correct name is Vatican Museums; plural, not singular – they truly are several museums in one complex. I would advise visitors to set aside an entire day and book a morning slot, half past twelve didn’t leave me enough time before closing.

The range of exhibits covers the entire gamut of human civilisation; from Egyptian mummies to post-modernist paintings, from Ancient Greek statues to Renaissance frescoes. The museums aren’t just galleries of Catholic religious art; they are also ethnographic museums; statuaries; natural history museums; contemporary art galleries. The Vatican Museums are every great museum in the world distilled into one location.

My favourite part of the Vatican Museums was the Gallery of Maps. This is a long, elaborately decorated, barrel-vaulted corridor with enormous painted maps along both sides; each map depicting a different region of the Italian peninsula. This gallery was commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII in 1580. I spent at least half an hour just marvelling at the detail and skill. By the cartographic standards of the sixteenth century these maps are incredibly detailed and accurate. I found all the places on the Italian peninsula that I had visited and travelled through so far.

A little further on I entered the Sistine Chapel. I took a few steps into the hall, extracted my phone from my pocket and took a photo. One second later a security guard came up to me and snarled at me. No photos! Photography forbidden! I apologised profusely but he didn’t seem mollified. I didn’t see any sign prohibiting photography in the Sistine Chapel but apparently it is. He didn’t make me delete the photograph from my phone so I have included this TOP SECRET ULTRA-ILLEGAL CLASSIFIED INFORMATION photo here for your enjoyment.

I found the Sistine Chapel rather unpleasant. It wasn’t that Michelangelo’s art wasn’t fantastic; of course it was. But the chapel was much dimmer than I expected; I had to squint to see some of the ceiling frescoes. Also, the priests running the show were simply horrible. There was a strict rule of silence in there, but of course people would whisper to each other in hushed reverential tones about being surrounded by such amazing art. People would begin to whisper quietly and the priests would bark at everyone at the top of their lungs – NO TALKING! THIS IS A SACRED PLACE! Then silence for a few seconds, a few of the hundreds of people in the Sistine Chapel would begin whispering once more, and thirty seconds later the priests would again bark at us – NO TALKING! DID YOU HEAR ME? NO TALKING! THIS IS A HOLY PLACE! RESPECT THE HOLINESS OF THIS CHAPEL! Honestly, the only people desecrating the holiness were the vicious, snarling priests acting like sadistic prison guards in some dystopian horror movie.

Another interesting thing were fragments of a moon rock. The crew of Apollo 11 brought back rocks from the moon and US President Richard Nixon sent little samples of them preserved in glass to every country in the world including the Vatican City. The last thing I visited was an ethnographic museum showing artefacts from indigenous cultures around the world; my country was represented with a large collection of dot paintings, woomeras, coolamons, boomerangs and Arnhem Land burial poles.

In the evening I went to a restaurant near my hotel. It was recommended in my Lonely Planet travel guide. I tend to avoid restaurants found in travel guides but I was sick of getting ripped off by scam artists posing as restaurateurs and I thought perhaps Lonely Planet would do a better job than I could at picking the genuine Italian places from the con jobs.

I thought correctly. Hostaria Dino e Toni is an old-fashioned trattoria in the neighbourhood of Prati and ought to be the greatest tourist attraction in all of Rome. The Colosseum? The Roman Forum? Pffft. They can’t even hold a candle to the greatness that is Hostaria Dino e Toni.

The place doesn’t look like it ought to be a great restaurant. Hostario Dino e Toni is a cramped little place with unassuming signage. The interior looks like it hasn’t changed much since the 1950s with battered green walls and chequered tablecloths. Yet the food was out of this world.

The two elderly proprietors, the eponymous Dino and Toni, constantly shuttled between the kitchen and the tables. There was no menu; whatever is being cooked on a given evening is what you get. Plate after plate of delicious food was placed on the table by the ever-smiling Dino and Toni. First, there was antipasto – salami, prosciutto, suppli, and spinach and ricotta pastry on a separate plate. This was followed by the first course, primo piatti – two pasta courses, really; rigatoni carbonara and rigatoni all’amatriciana in separate bowls; all washed down with a carafe of delectable house red wine and sparking mineral water. Dino suggested the second course, secondi piatti, various grilled meats and fish, but by this time I was more than full. I obliged by consenting to be served dessert, a nearly overflowing bowl of tiramisu.

Not only was the food divinely inspired but the atmosphere was fantastic. Dino and Tony were so friendly and happy and they made me feel like I was an honoured guest in their home. The courses were not only made with skill but made with love; love of food, love of life, love for their customers. It was rather expensive but I didn’t mind, it was worth every cent and then some.

While at Hostaria Dino e Tony all the bad things I had been thinking about Italy melted away. I had finally found the real Italy. And I learned a lesson: Italy is great. It’s just great in different ways to other countries.

Yes, Italy is disordered, dysfunctional, corrupt, barely belonging to the First World. But what life, what passion, what beauty. Thanks to Dino and Tony I no longer regretted coming here.

Ceiling fresco in the Vatican Museums

Egyptian mummy at the Vatican Museums

Statue of Ancient Greek statesman Pericles at the Vatican Museums

Adoration of the Magi at the Vatican Museums

Map of southern Italy in the Gallery of Maps at the Vatican Museums

Rome in the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums

San Marino in the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums

Moon rock samples at the Vatican Museums

Scale model of the entire country of Vatican City at the Vatican Museums

Payphone with Vatican City coat-of-arms at the Vatican Museums

Spinach and ricotta pastry at Hostaria Dino e Toni

Rigatoni carbonara at Hostaria Dino e Tony

Tiramisu at Hostaria Dino e Toni

Florence is an Italian city with an intensely savoury history. It is the venerable cradle of the Renaissance, that heady epoch when Western civilisation threw off the suffocating shroud of superstition and embraced enlightenment in the arts, in commerce, in politics. The town lays claim to being one of the birthplaces of modern capitalism, its merchant bankers financing military adventures, voyages of discovery, great public works. The very word “Florence” evokes the most famous political feuds of all time – the machinations of Machiavelli, the meddling of the Medicis.

I’m sure that history was waiting to be discovered. It was just rather difficult to find it among the dense crowds of thousands of tourists.

What you are about to read makes me a monstrous hypocrite, I am quite aware of this. I am going to write it anyway – there are way, WAY too many tourists in Florence. If I found the crowds difficult to handle on a grey, slightly chilly day in November, I would hate to see what Florence is like in August when the whole of Europe shuts down and everyone goes on holiday.

There appears to be no economic activity in Florence save for that related directly to tourism – rip-off restaurants, rip-off hotels, rip-off souvenir shops, rip-off ice cream vans, pickpockets, con artists. How on earth can a city retain its priceless heritage, hold true to its historical values, maintain its special way of life if every single person on the street is a tourist, if the city becomes nothing but a theme park for the amusement of short-term visitors? What will keep the city going if those tourists suddenly stop coming – a major war, say, or an economic depression, or crude oil running out making international travel prohibitively expensive?

I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe some sort of rationing system where you have to buy one of a limited number of vouchers to stay in Florence, sort of like what the government of Bhutan does. Or perhaps make the visitors stay in hotels in the suburbs or nearby towns with good public transport links to the historic centre. I don’t know. I’m sure there is a solution that balances preserving all the things that make a city special and allowing people from elsewhere to enjoy those things.

I still made a good attempt at enjoying those things as I shuffled out of Tina’s apartment and onto the crowded streets of Florence’s compact city centre in the late morning of Saturday, 9 November 2019. In no place which I have hitherto visited have so many architectural gems been crammed into so small a space as in Florence. The jewel, of course, is the Duomo, which is just as spectacular in daylight as it is at night. I couldn’t visit the interior of the cathedral, for some reason it was closed for much of the day and it was almost impossible to buy tickets. I went to one place to buy tickets only to be told that they didn’t sell tickets despite the massive sign outside saying Duomo tickets were sold there. God damn it, Italy!

There are plenty of other churches worth seeing – the Basilicas of San Lorenzo and of Santa Maria Novella among many. I hardly see why these other churches less than five minutes’ walk from the Duomo were necessary. Surely the entire population of Florence could fit within the enormous bulk of the Duomo, rendering the others superfluous?

I ambled through the Piazza della Signoria, one of the chief squares, on which is the striking castle-like Palazzo Vecchio, the “Old Palace” that was the centre of Florentine power. There is a plaque on the square marking the very spot where Girolama Savonarola was burnt at the stake in 1498. Savonarola was a populist priest who vehemently campaigned against the corruption of the ruling elite of the Republic of Florence and the perfidy of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. As reward for his efforts, the aforementioned elite executed him. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene – the angry denunciations by the shills of the Medicis, Savonarola’s devout followers wailing, the crackle of the firewood as Savonarola and two of his fellow priests were consumed by the flames – but I couldn’t. There were too many tourists for me to concentrate on anything else. Naughty tourists.

On one side of the Piazza della Signoria there is a loggia – a sort of open-sided covered courtyard surrounded by arches. Inside the loggia is an astounding collection of statues – Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus, The Rape of the Sabine Women, and many more.

A short walk south brought me to the banks of the Arno, a wide, rapid, muddy river the colour of Milo. A short distance downstream was one of Italy’s most famous bridges, the Ponte Vecchio. The “Old Bridge” is one of those mediaeval bridges that is lined with houses and shops. I crossed the bridge along with about a million other people. It was suffocating. Every shop – every single shop – along the bridge was selling jewellery. I don’t quite understand what the connection is between this particular bridge and jewellery. I mean, back in Sydney, Castlereagh Street is known for its jewellery shops, but it’s also a part of Sydney that is full of very well-paid business executives and finance workers so that sort of makes sense. But why the Ponte Vecchio? Why not elsewhere in Florence? I am mystified. I must confess that buying jewellery was the last thing on my mind as I tried to negotiate my way through the chaotic mêlée.

I walked back towards the Piazza della Signoria and waited in a very long, slow queue to buy tickets for admission to the Uffizi, one of the world’s most famous art galleries. It was worth the wait.

The Uffizi consists of two long buildings with a wide courtyard – more like a street – between them, and the two buildings are connected to each other at one end by a skyway. The word “Uffizi” literally means “offices”; they were built to house the offices of the public service of the Republic of Florence. Even now the Uffizi looks vaguely governmental. On each storey of each building there is a long corridor with large windows opening out onto the courtyard and off to the sides of the corridors away from the courtyard are rooms that used to house individual offices. I could easily imagine public servants waddling to and fro along the corridors carrying hefty files, ducking out for a smoko in the courtyard, gossiping in the doorways to the side offices. Nowadays the corridors are mostly dedicated to the Uffizi’s collection of statues while the paintings are in the side rooms.

Where do I begin? Unlike Michelangelo’s David at the Galleria dell’Accademia, there is no single work of art that defines the Uffizi. The collection is so heterogeneous, the buildings so vast, that without looking at my photographs I can only remember a handful of paintings. But what a collection nonetheless! The Uffizi is ordered chronologically. The visitor starts in the Middle Ages – church triptychs, crucifix paintings, that sort of thing. Then in the late fifteenth century something very special happened right there in Florence – somebody discovered perspective. This changed art forever.

As the Renaissance marched on, artists experimented and discovered more techniques that made their works even more realistic – light and shadow, focus, mist in the background to accentuate the foreground. The depiction of facial expressions became more nuanced, more accurate in their expression of human emotion. I particularly admired Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, a seventeenth-century female artist who herself had been the victim of sexual assault and no doubt enjoyed a visceral revenge in her painting of a heroine decapitating a grotty old man. There were plenty of works by Botticelli, da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and many other great masters of the Renaissance.

Towards the end I found the Uffizi boring. Not because the art was poor, but because the art was great and there was far too much for my puny mind to absorb in one go. As I have written before, even beauty becomes boring if you have too much of it. So shortly before closing time I gratefully spilled out onto a street behind the Uffizi.

By this time I was starving and I picked the nearest restaurant I could find – a somewhat American-style diner that sold burgers, hot dogs, hot chips and the like. I love Italian food but I felt like a change so I went there. I ordered a cheeseburger, chips and Coke. It took forever even though there were few customers. When it arrived I began to eat one of the most disappointing meals I have ever had. The burger had limp, mushy lettuce, a stale bun and a charred, desiccated beef patty. The chips were disgusting little things, almost certainly frozen chips from the supermarket. When it was time to pay I was given the bill. It was about sixteen euros, roughly five euros more than I had expected.

“What the f#$?” I shouted involuntarily. This was much more than the price given on the menu stuck to the wall outside. I argued with the arrogant, distinctly unlikeable proprietor.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Service charge,” he said dismissively.

“Service charge? What bloody service charge? I didn’t see anything about a f#$%ing service charge!” I squeaked several octaves above my usual vocal range.

“Yes, issa right here,” he said as he pointed to fine print at the bottom of the back of the in-house menu. And what do you know, there was a massive service charge plain to see – if you were carrying an electron tunnelling microscope around with you, which I doubt few tourists do.

I gulped and paid my bill and glared at the restaurateur like the Devil himself. If I were any angrier I probably would have been inclined to do my very own Judith and Holofernes re-enactment.

The sun was setting and I decided to climb the Campanile, the Duomo’s bell tower. I bought a ticket and climbed the stairs as the sun set over Tuscany. It was a hard slog but I have climbed enough church towers in Europe by now to know what to expect. I emerged up the top and watched the last light tickle the horizon as Florence twinkled below. It was a magical sight far above the madding crowd, a city of terracotta roof tiles and church steeples and narrow yellow-lit streets set in a bowl of Tuscan mountains. The waxing moon rising in the east made the view even more enticing. The great red-bricked bulk of the dome of the Duomo loomed close in sight, a work of art in its own right.

I also had a look inside the Baptistry, an octagonal building in front of the Duomo and part of the cathedral. Oh goodness, how much beauty can one see in one day? Surely it is possible to overdose. Gilded frescoes of the most lustrous sheen adorned the interior of the dome while the floor had the most perfectly laid patterned tiles. The altar shone as if it were a portal to Heaven itself.

I retired to my room for a while then went out for a late-night dinner. Unlike Sydney where it is nearly impossible to get a decent bite to eat after nine o’clock nowadays and citizens are expected to tuck themselves into bed at sunset like good little boys and girls (thanks a bloody lot, Liberal Party!), European cities are very well suited to night owls such as myself. I wasn’t going to leave Florence without trying the most famous dish of the City of Lilies, bistecca alla Fiorentina. This literally means “Florence steak”. So I flicked through Tina’s notebook on the desk in my room and found a nearby trattoria she recommended. I was sceptical – it’s just a steak, how could it possibly be any better than steaks back home? Oh boy, how wrong I was.

I don’t know the magical secrets of Florence’s chefs. I don’t know what they do to make a slice of cow flesh taste so great – so tender and so juicy yet with just the right amount of flavourful charring. It was certainly a fitting crescendo to my final night in Florence. Despite all the sham, the rip-off merchants, the impenetrable thickets of ambling tourists, some of its historical magic still manages to shine through. Bravo!

Florence Duomo and the Baptistry

Palazzo Vecchio, the centre of power in the Republic of Florence

"Menelaus Supporting the Body of Patroclus" at the Loggia dei Lanzi on the Piazza della Signoria

Ponte Vecchio over the Arno river

A typical corridor of the Uffizi

Maestro della Croce, "Crucifix and Eight Stories from the Passion", ca. 1240

Leonardo da Vinci, "Annunciation", ca. 1472-5

Artemisia Gentileschi, "Judith Beheading Holofernes", ca. 1620-1

Filippo Lippi, "Madonna and Child with Two Angels", 1460-5 - a very early example of perspective in painting

The Tribune of the Uffizi with its shell-lined dome

"The Birth of Venus", Sandro Botticelli, 1480s

Caravaggio, "The Sacrifice of Isaac", ca. 1603-4

Perugino, "Portrait of a Young Man", ca. 1494

Giovanni Bellini, "Lamentation over the Body of Christ", 1500-1506

Dome of the Duomo and Florence at night

Florence at sunset from the Duomo Campanile

The dome of the Baptistry of the Florence Duomo

Altar of the Baptistry of the Florence Duomo

Campanile bell tower of the Florence Duomo

Bistecca alla fiorentina

San Marino is a fantastic little country but there wasn’t much to detain me for more than two nights. I had to keep exploring the world, so I had a buffet breakfast at the Hotel Joli, checked out, and walked up to the bus interchange to wait for the 10:30 bus back to Rimini on the brilliantly sunny morning of Thursday 7 November 2019.

San Marino’s sole public transport link to the rest of the world is a single bus route that runs between the City of San Marino and Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast ten times a day. I boarded the comfortable modern bus – this time the driver put my five-euro note in the cash tray and gave me a ticket, what refreshing honesty – and the bus almost rolled downhill along the hairpin bends like a pinball in a waterslide all the way to Rimini. It entered the city (not much traffic this time), went past the Augustus Arch which was once the main gate to the city on the road from Rome and is still used by pedestrians two millennia later, and then to the nearby railway station where I disembarked.

Rimini is a mid-sized city on Italy’s eastern Adriatic seaboard and is best known for its immense length of beach lined with resort hotels; Italy’s Gold Coast. However, unlike the Gold Coast, Rimini actually has history and culture. Rimini has a historically significant old town. I had some two hours until my train so I went for a stroll.

First, I walked along the waterfront of Rimini’s ancient port to the Tiberius Bridge, a gleaming white span of stone arches. I walked across it. This is more amazing than it sounds. The Tiberius Bridge is two thousand years old, dating from the time when, well, Tiberius was Emperor of Rome. It is still in use and not just by Australian backpackers. Cars, trucks, Vespas, cyclists and pedestrians all use this two-millennia structure to get between Rimini’s city centre and its northern neighbourhoods. I smiled as I crossed it. In the Sydney suburb of Parramatta there is a sandstone arch bridge from the 1830s built by convicts, the Lennox Bridge is seen as a historic treasure and especially ancient. Ha. I learned about the Roman Empire at school, but learning about antiquity in history lessons is only in the abstract. When I walked on a structure built by a glorious long-dead empire that I have only ever known from textbooks – what a magnificent sentiment that experience aroused.

I headed back across the river to the historic centre following ancient city walls and then into the Piazza Cavour, Rimini’s main square, with its fifteenth-century church and Arabesque town hall. A short walk away through narrow, cosy shopping thoroughfares is the Malatesta Temple. This fifteenth-century church was built by Sigismondo Malatesta, a local nobleman, in honour of his mistress. God damn it, Italy!

I went back to the station. There was a left luggage office in there. When I arrived in Rimini I had intended to store my backpack there, but it was closed with a sign on the door that said in Italian “Back in 5 minutes”. I had waited five minutes and there was no sign of the attendant so I explored Rimini with my backpack on. When I returned to the station the office was still closed and there was an American couple standing in front of it waiting for it to open. They had been waiting twenty minutes. I told them of my experiences and advised them not to bother. God damn it, Italy!

After a yummy lasagne for lunch at the station restaurant, my first of two trains of the day arrived, the all-stations Regionale 6464 scheduled to depart at 13:15. It was a very nice train, an Alstom Pop, a brand-new sleek and shiny three-car electric train with USB chargers and comfortable high-back seats. I was impressed. Except for the annoying habit of only showing the next train on the platform displays several minutes before the train is due and not showing arrivals and departures in different colours on the displays in the booking hall, I have no complaints about Italian trains so far. They are reasonably frequent, comfortable, and (by European standards, not Australian standards) rather cheap. My fare to Florence was €13.95, hardly extortionate for a 163 kilometre journey.

The Alstom Pop took off from Rimini on the ruler-straight dead flat main line that runs along the very southernmost edge of the Po Valley plain where it meets the Apennine mountains. It stopped at every town, the service was well used and in parts it was standing room only. At one point I crossed the Rubicon. Yes, I did. A short distance north of Rimini the train crossed the Rubicon, a small muddy stream. It was hard to believe that such a puny river is of such historical importance. I said “alea iacta est” as the train went over the river – blink and you’ll miss it – even though I was crossing in the opposite direction to Julius Caesar who illegally led his army the other way back into the territory of the Roman Republic.

About forty-five minutes later I got off at the town of Faenza where I had only a few minutes to change to a small three-car diesel train along the minor branch line from Faenza to Florence. This mountainous line crosses the Apennines, following a vineyard-lined valley through tunnels and viaducts and the kind of ramshackle villages you see in television advertisements for pasta sauce. The terrain got steeper with forested mountains cleft by rushing rivers and scattered farms. After passing through a long tunnel the line descended the other side of the Apennines and into the grimy suburbs of Florence, a landscape of neglected apartment buildings and desolate railway stations where every surface was covered in graffiti.

At about four o’clock the train terminated at Firenze Santa Maria Novella station, Florence’s main railway terminus. I took a photo of my train. I guess you could call it Florence and the Machine.

Santa Maria Novella station is not what I was expecting from Florence. The station was built in the Fascist era and is a bland, utilitarian, modernist brick warehouse. Surely Italy’s greatest jewel of the Renaissance deserves a railway station more in keeping with the city’s aesthetic ethos?

It was about a fifteen minute walk to my room in my Airbnb host’s apartment. After climbing four stories – very high stories – a lovely young woman, Tina, welcomed me into her apartment. I do have ethical qualms about Airbnb, I do not think it is fair that tourists push locals out of their city’s rental market. But this is a spare bedroom in an apartment owned by Tina, a setup I am OK with.

Tina showed me around her gorgeously decorated apartment. Tina is a fashion designer of Serbian origin who moved to Florence to pursue her career. She showed me how to use her Bialetti Moka Pot – believe me, it takes practice. I couldn’t manage to brew anything except burnt charcoal toxic sludge or weak light-brown piss. I think I will stick with my trusty coffee plunger (what Australians call French presses) at home.

After dumping my luggage I kept exploring because there was something that was about to close soon. Only a few blocks away was the Galleria dell’Accademia. There is a statue in there you may have heard of. For some reason, I got free admission – I don’t know why, perhaps because it was close to closing time, but the front desk waved me through. I stepped in and then I saw it. Michelangelo’s David.

There is a psychiatric disorder called Stendhal’s Syndrome. It is caused by people seeing an immensely beautiful work of art and then descending into hysteric delirium so severe that staff have to call the police who haul the unfortunate sufferer off to the nearest lunatic asylum for a lengthy stay, presumably involving a frontal lobotomy, electro-convulsive therapy and a hundred different pills. I almost fell victim to Stendhal’s Syndrome. That is how beautiful David is.

How do I describe it? It’s like all the photographs you’ve seen, only better. The detail, man, the detail! The bulging veins on David’s wrist. The subtle definition of all the muscles. The determination in his face. The tinea on his left foot. No human being could possibly have made a sculpture so perfect; David must have been divinely inspired. There is no alternative rational explanation.

Though the Galleria dell’Accademia is smaller and not as well known as the Uffizi, it still has plenty of other artworks, some of them quite notable – The Rape of the Sabines, mediaeval triptychs, Renaissance portraits of Florentine nobles. They just can’t compare to Michelangelo’s David so I don’t really remember them.

I went on an evening ramble through Florence’s astounding historic old town. The centrepiece is the Duomo, the city’s cathedral. This is an unusual church – from afar it has a whimsical look, almost like it is a dollhouse constructed of coloured cardboard. When you look at the walls up close, you see that it is made of the most exquisite marble in multiple colours – white, green, pink. The pride in work of the artisans who built this thing was extraordinary.

Tina had given me plenty of restaurant recommendations all neatly written in a notebook left on the desk in my room. I chose a pasta restaurant. Pasta restaurants aren’t uncommon in Italy, but this one was special – the pasta was fresh. By “fresh”, I mean “the pasta does not even exist when you order it and a grinning Nonna makes it right there in front of your eyes”. Back home I buy expensive Italian pasta from the deli section of a greengrocer’s shop near my place, but now that I have eaten freshly made pasta, nothing I can buy in Australia could possibly compare. I’ve been spoilt.

My post-prandial perambulations led me through the Piazza della Repubblica, a large nineteenth-century square where a merry-go-round, ice cream stand and con artists were doing a roaring trade, and along the buzzing streets of Florence. I love European cities at night. So much life, so much spirit, so many things to do and see and eat and drink and buy, without any of the violence and bad attitude you see in Australian cities on weekend nights. Why does Australia have to be so … so … so bogan?

Mount Titano from the highway leaving San Marino

Augustus Arch in Rimini

Tiberius Bridge

Malatesta Temple

My train from Rimini to Faenza

Train from Faenza to Florence

Vineyards near Brisighella

Apennines scenery between Faenza and Florence

A very grotty railway station in Florence's suburbs

"David"

The other side of "David" you never see on postcards

David's tinea

Duomo of Florence

Piazza della Repubblica