Well, our trip started off with a very stressful bang. We woke up this morning to a message that the airbnb (link below-don't give them your business) we booked back in DECEMBER canceled on us THE DAY BEFORE WE WERE ABOUT TO STAY FOR 30 DAYS... Our flight just hours away, and now we find out that we've got no place to stay once we fly halfway around the world. Cool cool. This is fine. Everything's fine.
So, poor Frankie spent the next 6 hours or so juggling between getting ready, heading to the airport, getting checked in and through security, and during most of our first flight arguing with airbnb and trying to find another place. I helped by at least finding us a place to stay for the next few days until we go to Lucca next week.
After much ado (including our cousin Maria Cristina and niece Miriam calling the original place and giving them a firm dose of "don't mess with our family"... Love those ladies) and after much consternation, which we carried through the plane trip over so neither of us were really able to sleep during the flight, we were able to find two places to replace the original one-first a hotel near the train station and then a place just up the hill from the Boboli gardens. All for only about 5x what the first place would have cost. Lucky us.
We are still fighting/negotiating with airbnb over the additional cost, as we were promised a couple of things over the phone, and then what they offered once we'd re-booked was a fraction of that.
We also think that we may be able to get some reimbursement from our travel insurance, as the reason the original place gave for canceling is that there was a gas leak in the building, rendering it uninhabitable.
Now, we've got our doubts as to the veracity of that claim, especially given they canceled for the entire month when something like that could be resolved in a matter of days, and within an hour of them canceling they'd reposted the place for the same dates we'd booked (and for 6 times the price we'd paid), then took the post down after Frankie reported them to airbnb. But, the official reason given may still qualify for reimbursement from the insurance, so that would be nice.
Anyway, the trip aside from that was relatively uneventful, other than our flight was very full and I'm still utterly gobsmacked that an airplane (777) can weigh about 300k lbs, carry around 300 people and all their luggage, and still manage to get off the ground and fly 4400 miles. We live in a charmed time, my friends.
We decided this time to go straight to Florence and push the Rome visit to the end of the trip, so after we landed we hopped on a train to Florence. To our pleasant surprise, Mauro, Maria Pia, and Miriam were at the station to greet us. They walked us to our hotel and made sure we got checked in (and the people at the hotel knew we have family here ❤️). Then they left us to get settled in and rest, promising we'd be picked up at 8pm for dinner.
The building of our hotel has 5 or 6 separate hotels in it. It's an interesting concept which I think is specific to Italy, called a pensione--a smaller, typically family-run hotel. So it's common to have multiple hotels in one building that have just a handful of rooms.
The main area for our pensione is on the 4th floor (but remember, in Italy they consider the ground floor to be the 0 floor, so what we'd call the second floor in the states is called the first floor. So by US terms, it's on the 5th floor. From here on out, I'll use their method since we're here, so as not to confuse anything.
Our room however is on the third floor, and when the man gave us the key, he said to take our luggage in the lift down to the next floor and he'd meet us there to let us into the room. We were talking when we got to the 3rd floor, so we weren't really paying attention to how we got to our room. More to come on that in a bit.
The room is fine. Nothing special, but clean and will do just fine for a few days. The bathroom is a bit small, but Frankie thinks if he finagles it right, he could possibly use the toilet, soak his feet in the bidet, AND wash his hands all at the same time, so that's a plus. 🤣
After the owner showed us to our room, he said something about emergency exits and that we can't go back out or come back in the same way we came that didn't make sense when he told us, but since we hadn't paid much attention to how we came in, we said OK and thanked him, and he left us to it.
So imagine my confusion when I ran out a bit later to get some water for our cpaps and found that the elevator and staircase that wraps around it, which I SWEAR we took to get to our room, was nowhere to be found.
Now the only egress was a single stairway that went up, so I took it. At the top, I found myself in the hotel lobby again, so I walked out the way we came in and got on the elevator.
When I came back from the store, I took the elevator to the third floor and it looked all wrong. No hotel rooms, just the stairwell and a huge white door. That's when the emergency door conversation we'd had when we checked in finally clicked. So, I hopped back on the lift, took it to to the 4th floor, then walked over to the single stairway and down to the CORRECT third floor to get back to our room.
So, to sum up... To get back to street level from our room you go up to the fourth floor then take the elevator down. To get back up to our room, you take the elevator up to the 4th floor, then walk down the OTHER set of stairs to the third floor. Got it? 😭🤣
We showered and rested up a bit, and at around 8 Maria Cristina and Miriam picked us up for dinner. They took us to their new house in oltrarno, which they bought, remodeled, and moved into earlier this year. It's a gorgeous place, and they saved some of the original architectural themes, like these gorgeous arches. Adding to that they have some amazing antique pieces of their own (including a 200ish year old missal). In typical Italian form, they've done a superb job of honoring the past and embracing the modern, marrying the two together in a beautiful home.
No surprise, we ate like kings, beginning with prosciutto è melone and a meat and cheese plate. When Cristina served that, she explained that the meat was a salami (delicious), and the cheese was a pecorino. There was a bowl on the plate and she explained that it was honey, and instructed us to put it on the pecorino. Now, I can't stand honey. As recently as a few months ago, I tried fresh honey from northern Arizona when I was on vacation and confirmed that I really hate honey. However, when someone invites you to their home and prepares food for you, you experience the meal in the manner they intend, so I complied.
We've noticed a few things we'd forgotten during the day, I've listed some of them below, and while I didn't forget that so many things here are magical and defy explanation, I was reminded of it when I took a little taste of the honey and found that I absolutely loved it. It was delicious, and for the first time in my life I could actually taste the different flavors of the flowers the pollen came from, and it was sweet, but not too sweet. It tasted fantastic with the pecorino.
The pasta dish was next, and it was topped with Maria Pia's pomodoro, which we remembered from our last visit. It is simple and delicious. After that, we had roasted turkey and peas with pancetta. The turkey was delicious-- moist, flavorful, and cooked perfectly. The peas were some more Florentine witchcraft, because I hate peas, but I really liked these.
For dessert we had cantucci è Vin Santo (we had brought the Vin Santo, as is the custom here when you are invited to someone's house). For anyone who hasn't read our recaps from 2 years ago, cantucci is similar to what we in the states know as biscotti, but they're about half the length. While in the states we dip them in coffee to soften them up, here they dip them in an amber dessert wine. The cantucci are very simple, and not very sweet as cookies go (probably why in the US we typically add chocolate of some sort when we make them), so when you mix them with the sweet wine, they balance each other out and you get a perfect, light dessert that makes me so happy I actually did a little happy dance to myself while I was eating it. 😅
There was also some other cookies there that they'd purchased from their friend who owns the bakery downstairs, and Frankie said they were good, but as soon as the cantucci and Vin Santo came out, there was nothing else I wanted.
Before we left, we all had a round of limoncello and Frankie raised a toast to family. ❤️❤️
Given that we'd been up for about 32 hours by then, Cristina and Miriam took us back to our hotel, but when we got there we found that we were still a bit restless, and Frankie had said earlier he wouldn't feel like we were actually here until he'd seen the Duomo, so we took a walk over to see her.
My but she is a gorgeous thing.
There was a bar open near there so we had a nightcap, with possibly the most beautiful view anyone can have while enjoying a cocktail. Between that and the walk back, we were finally tired, so now we sleep off some of this jetlag and hope it doesn't eat up too much of tomorrow.
Buona notte, firenze. We are happy to be home to you!
Things we had forgotten:
- When taking the train from fiumicino airport to the Roma train station, you must check in on the app or punch your ticket (if it's a physical one)-the fine for that is pretty hefty, so don't forget
- As a rule, public toilets don't have seats
- The bottled water here has the caps attached so you don't lose them-pretty cool
Links:
The airbnb you should never, ever book because they suck: https://air.tl/rjIiKqcL
The super cute hotel that's one of like 6 in the building: https://www.hotelalinari.com/?act=home&l=en
The new airbnb: https://air.tl/6ei3wpb0
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