Arrivederci Firenze

The Economist wrote about PhD programmes a week ago and concluded that doing a PhD is waste of time. It was slightly discouraging to read such an article only a few days before I was finishing my thesis but, at the same time, I could only think that the last 3 and half years have been an excellent period in my life and living in Florence was an amazing experience. If I don't manage to translate my extended studies into economic benefits, at least I have had the opportunity to learn about Italian culture, admire painters from Giotto to Michelangelo, and visit dozens of beautiful Tuscan churches. So, I always have the plan B of becoming a tourist guide in Florence...

Of course, the whole autumn (my last one in Florence) was a huge nostalgic period when I was constantly thinking that I will have to give up my life in Florence that I had just now learnt to fully appreciate. Even those two months when I was the first one at the library at 8h30 when it opened (after a cappuccino and cornetto in San Domenico) and left around nine o'clock in the evening and hardly had the time to explore Florence, I was enjoying my stay.

During my last weekend, I strolled around the city to go through all my favourite spots of the city and walked up to San Miniato. It has the best view of Florence. The church itself is also amazing; so amazing that during one of the Florentine wars, Michelangelo protected the church with mattresses against the enemy's weapons. I sat inside for a while and in the comfortable isolation shed a few tears, out of happiness of having had such great last few months in Italy, beauty of the place and melancholy.

The last weeks in Florence were so busy that suddenly, via Cologne's Christmas market and Brussels, I was back in cold and snowy Finland, complaining about Senegalese tomatoes found in the supermarket and bad coffee found everywhere and drunk excessively. Later it was also snowing in Florence, something I've never seen. People who had stayed there posted images and Facebook comments on the chaos in the city. This video as well:

Olio nuovo

While the on-going season is usually accompanied by a gentle jingle of wine bottles when people are hurrying to pre-Christmas parties, my bag was jingling because of something else. I had just purchased three bottles of our institute's olive oil. From late October to end of November markets are filled with olive oil vendors promoting their freshly pressed olio nuovo, new olive oil. The olive trees in our institute's lands are also contributing to this exciting culinary season.

Photo from Talk of Tomatoes blog with a description of olio tasting in Tuscany.

New olive oil is lime green, unfiltered and bitter in a way that you become slightly addicted. My dinners will consist of mostly bread during the next week as I just want to savour the delicious taste of olive oil. It's also very good in different minestrones or soups. My new favourite recipe is Tuscan-style soup with potatoes, onions, chick peas, cavolo nero (black cabbage?) and other root veggies that are part of the autumn season. The soup gets especially good after three or four days. Yesterday I added the rest of pici (spaghetti type of fresh pasta from Siena) and today when I finally finished the soup it was at its best. And of course I drizzled a lot of olio nuovo on top of it.

Giorgio Locatelli is an Italian chef and the author of magnificent "Made in Italy, Food and Stories" that makes me feel like spending hundred euros in a good balsamico di Modena. He writes about Italian cuisine in a way that you're annoyed that you were born in a country with no special emotional attachment to food. Actually, I think that one of the most important things I learnt while living in Italy is the way of "living" food and not just eat, cook, or even enjoy it. Locatelli writes about olive oil, the liquid gold: "In Italy, olive oil is still considered something you buy from someone you know, either direct from a local small producer, or via a shop that will probably only stock a few oils." What would then be better oil for me than the 'Badia Fiesolana, olio extra vergine di oliva', from the trees that I have probably been contemplating while writing my thesis.

Olive oil has been produced since around 5000 BC but only around two decades ago it arrived to Finland promoted as a healthy Southern product that was considered as the reason for longevity in Italy or Greece. Today everybody knows that you should buy extra virgin oil even though few actually know what's the difference really between basic olive oil, virgin oil and extra virgin. From Locatelli (my new food guru), I learnt that extra virgin oil is extracted only by cold-pressing without chemicals and has a very low acidity (less than 1 per cent, what ever that means...). I also engaged in a "field study" to get hands-on information about olives. When following a group of Italians picking olives in Settignano, outside Florence, on a beautiful November day, I ended up asking them a couple of questions. I found out that one tree can produce something from 10 to 20 litres of olives. On the one side of the road, a sophisticated method was being used to pick up the olives: a tractor with a special equipment shook olive trees while another tractor was holding big plastic sheets underneath it. On the other side, people with whom I was talking picked them manually, some people climbing on the ladders and others laying nets below the trees. It was all very idyllic and if we weren't in a hurry (for spritz!), I would have liked to stay and if not to help at least to observe. (By the way, olives directly from the trees are not made for eating! Their amazing bitterness might be however worth to try out...)

Happy olio nuovo season!

The End of Renaissance Art Escapes

I've been working from 8h30 in the morning until 20h, 21h or 22h in the evening due to the desperate attempt to finish my PhD thesis by Christmas. Therefore, my enjoyment of Florence has been restrained to speeding through Piazza SS. Annunziata and having a glimpse of the Fiesole hills surrounded by thick grey clouds before reserving my desk at the library.

Bronzino: Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo and her son Giovanni. A painting of Cosimo de Medici's wife and son; Eleonora's brocade clothes look so real you wanted to touch them and her face so undecipherable that you wanted to be her best friend.

Though I had detailed a long to do -list for the weekend, I didn't have the force to sit by the computer anymore (well, here I am again!). At the market I bought gorgonzola, pecorino stagionato, fresh pasta filled with artichokes, asparagus cream, red pesto sauce, and flowers – I decided that I have to make the most out of these last three weeks in Florence.

I started by visiting the Uffizi gallery in the afternoon before a concert at the Teatro della Pergola. I had been waiting for November and the end of the tourist season to get in without queuing. It was already my sixth time in the museum, but it's still not enough to give all the paintings the contemplation they deserve. On this occasion, I only wanted to spend some quality time with my favourite pieces. Sandro Botticelli's Primavera and The Birth of Venus are of course one of them. A couple of weeks ago, I actually felt personally a bit offended when a friend of mine said that she preferred seeing them in an art book. Of course, the colours might have faded but standing in front of these absolutely beautiful masterpieces is something completely different from sitting on your sofa and flipping through your copy of "1000 art works you need to see before you die" (by the way, if this book exists, I want it for Christmas). It's like my dad who says: "Why should I travel abroad if I can see all the different places in the world on a TV."

I actually didn't like Renaissance art before coming to Florence. It is not necessarily as accessible as Impressionism, but now, after three years of indulgence in Florentine art through visits in the museums and churches, I can define myself as a Renaissance lover and I would like to call myself an aficionado. Things were not always like this, my first visit to Palazzo Pitti's wonderful collection was with a charming intellectual who wanted to share his love for Caravaggio and other great masters with me. However, I was feeling sick because of the lack of air condition and the drinks the day before and I could only focus on the slightest currents of air every now and then. Instead of art, we had pizza slices in the garden of Boboli.


But yesterday, in front of the majestic Madonna and Child and Two Angels by Filippo Lippi (above), I almost wanted to cry. The beauty of the work and the realisation that soon I wouldn't be able to admire these amazing paintings hit me. I stood in front of the Madonna for a long moment as if to memorize the lines and colours of it by heart (I later also bought a post card and book on the Uffizi gallery to help me with this task). By the way, it's probably no coincidence that I find the women in both Botticelli's and Lippi's works so beautiful and serene as Filippo Lippi was Botticelli's teacher.

Today, I continued my cultural exploration and visited the exhibition dedicated to a later Renaissance painter Bronzino in Palazzo Stozzi. Coincidently, I had seen an exhibiton of his drawings earlier this year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where they had managed to collect almost all the existing drawings by him. But this was a first ever exhibiton of his paintings. Bronzino (1503-1572) worked in the Medici court and was also a poet and a member of Accademia Fiorentina. Already after the first room of the exhibiton, I knew that he deserves a place in the same category with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps after this great exhibition he will be acknowledged as one of the great masters of the Renaissance and not only a peculiar mannerist. He also seemed to have a good sense of irony as shown by his work of the Medici court's dwarf (below).


This double-sided painting was Bronzino's reply to the on-going dispute about the primacy of different art forms. His contemporary, Benedetto Varchi had solicited that sculpture was the most noble of all arts. Bronzino responded with Portrait of the Dwarf Morgante that can be placed in the middle of the room as a statue but moreover, it can depict more than one time dimension. Hence, one side shows Morgnate going to hunt birds and the other side illustrates him afterwards with his pray. As a curiosity, the bird in front of Morgante's private parts was painted later by an unknown painter.


When seeing the magnificent tapestries that Bronzino designed and Flemish masters wove for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, you couldn't help but wonder how they were done and how they had survived five centuries. Indeed, this was the first time after the 1980s that they were on public display. These tapestries and their restoration provoked a little dispute between me and my historian friend who joined me for the exhibiton. She considered restoration of art as an act against the normal flow of history. If art creations deteriorate (and they do), we are not suppose to restore them. Art should show the signs of time, she argued continuing that restoration is like a translation of literature, it can never offer the exact same feeling or represent the original work fully. In contrast, I felt this was complete non-sense; the majority of the works on display in this exhibiton wouldn't have been there at all without some restoration or they would have been only a shadow of the things we were currently examining. The whole preparation of the exhibiton had been accompanied by difficult and important restorations. In fact, I think we have the responsibility to restore the works of art for the future generations before they are ruined forever. Obviously, there's a chance that something of the original piece will get lost even with high standards and modern technologies, but to refer to her analogy on literature, I rather read the Finnish translation of Crime and Punishment than not read it all (or study Russian for ten years to be able to read it in its original language / build a time machine so I could see the paintings when they were still fresh of recently applied paint). However, I do not agree with Berlusconi on giving the antique sculpture of god of Mars his manhood back in the form of magnetic and removable penis (probably I wouldn't agree with him on anything else either).

This was acually on display at MET, it's a design for the tapestries that we saw now in Palazzo Strozzi.

One of the great works of Bronzino Descent of Christ into Limbo (below) was restored after it was badly damaged in the 1966 floods. It wasn't on display at the exhibition but the copy of it in my new Bronzino book inspired me to go to the Church of Santa Croce to have a look of it. It's a powerful painting where Christ is saving the souls of the unbaptized. Bronzino had basically depicted all his entourage in that painting, among which himself with the blue robe behind Jesus and some of the most beautiful young ladies of Florence. Obviously resulting in a scandal in those days. Raffaello Borghini, an important Florentine, criticized it because of the "figures excessive nudity, sensual poses and supple limbs, and very fair colours" that would distract the uncultured from prayer. Not to mention the modern cartoon-like monsters in the top left corner. But the women are purely beautiful and each face is paint with such a painstaking attention to detail and naturalism that Bronzino was so famous for.

A detail from Descent of Christ into Limbo.

Indeed, Giorgio Vasari, the art authority of the time and the writer of "The Lives of Artists", which could be considered as the first art history book in the world, already wrote of Bronzino's portraits: "They were all very natural, executed with incredible diligence, and finished so well that nothing more could be desired". Below is a portrait of Cosimo's illegitimate daughter Bia who died already at the age of 6. This was one of my favourite portraits in the exhibition.


Conclusion of the weekend: it's always so much easier to get inside an artist's head or a moment in history of art in general in an exhibiton with a more focused theme. While I believe that Uffizi gallery is one of the best museums in the world, even there the collection spanning from Giotto to da Vinci and Tintoretto, or from Christian art to the full bloom of Renaissance and Venetian masters, is sometimes too much to grasp (hence the limited focus of my last visit). I never get to Venetian masters or Caravaggio with some energy left and this is only the history of Italian art during around 300 years. What about Louvre or MET: in one afternoon you go through Egyptian art and Impressionists with a deviation to Asian culture. What kind of sadist built these museums? Small is beautiful – and intelligible.

Ognissanti all'Isola di San Michele

Free vaporetto boats connected Cannaregio to Isola di San Michele during the weekend of All Saints (1 November in Catholic countries). People were carrying huge bouquets of crysanthemums to replace the artificial flowers on the graves. Isola di San Michele is Venetians' cemetery where the people of La Serenissima have found their last place of rest ever since Napoleon ordered the island to be used for this purpose.

Once again, without flowers, I was an outsider in the flow of Venetians cleaning their family graves and ordering flowers. Somehow I always find myself in places where I feel a bit like an intruder. Especially in Venice, where people must hope that at least with death they will have peace from the tourists occupying the city by millions every year (18 millions to be exact). However, in 'the island of death', the Saturday before Ognissanti was busy. In Finland, candles are lit in the cemeteries in memory of the dead ones, but in Italy, as the weather permits, graveyard is decorated with flowers.

Cemetery of San Michele stores the graves efficiently in many floors...

I find cemeteries an interesting cultural destination in different countries. I have done the usual tourist paths in search of the graves of Jim Morrison (Come on baby light my fire) and Édith Piaf (Je ne regrette rien) in Père-Lachaise in Paris and marvelled the huge burial monuments in Buenos Aires' La Recoleta (Don't cry for me Argentina by the grave of Eva Perón). I have been amazed by the kitch decoration of a cemetary in Punta Arenas, in Chilean Patagonia. And by kitch, I mean plastic Santa Claus puppets and Christmas lights behind the glass vitrines (this was in January). In front of our high school, we looked inspiration for creative writing from the age-old grave stones from the 18th century. In Warsaw, I witnessed the collapsed stones and rampant plants in a Jewish cemetery. In Mostar, I was saddened by disproportionately many graves from the beginning of the 1990s, young and old Bosnians alike. In Normandy, I visited the American cemetery full of simple white crosses, soldiers of 20 years old from Ohio, California and Minnesota, so far from home. You can't think of any excuses or reasons for wars in Verdun, where in the ossuary rest the remains of 130 000 French and German unknown soldiers from the battle of 1916. You can't visit a cemetery without a little thought for all the dead ones that lie below the ground (or in the little walls as in Venice) and that's why it is probably so intriguing visit, home or abroad.

In the cemetery of San Michele you can find only a few "famous" graves: one of Ezra Pound and the other one of Igor Stravinsky (I spotted the two of them). However, even without some famous graves or monuments to look for, I was quite dazzled by the place: walls filled with name tags and photos, family graves decorated with mosaics of the family head (like the one above) and completely destroyed tomb stones. And then, the three crosses of a Norwegian ambassador's family (below); the daughter died at the age of thirty and the parents a bit later. Nobody took care of these graves long forgotten. "But still", I thought, "if I can choose, I want to die in Venice" (but not drowning in the waves of the turquoise lagoon).

Hugging St. James

After road tripping in Portugal and exploring some more great sea food in Vigo (Spain), I arrived to Santiago de Compostela. I have wanted to visit the beautiful capital of Galicia since I first read about the pilgrimage route of Santiago so I had high expectations about the city but, on the other hand, I already anticipated a partial disappointment.

I was again feeling like an outsider (just like when watching marathon runners) as I arrived to the city by train and not by foot as most of the people attending the pilgrims' mass at the cathedral. I had wanted to attend the mass in order to see the world's largest "botafumeiro" (smoke expeller in Galician), or a thurible, suspended from the roof and in which incense is burnt during the mass. During the holy year (and 2010 happens to be one as Saint James' birthday in July falls on Sunday), they swing the botafumeiro during the pilgrims' mass (every day at noon) and it should be a wonderful sight. I didn't see it after all, but Youtube of course makes travelling in general useless as you can see these extraordinary things from your office chair. It's actually pretty hilarious, the young priests are getting wild...



Instead of seeing botafumeiro swinging around (quite dangerously in my opinion, but I guess that they have a higher power involved in the business), I focussed on pilgrim-watching (I also had an audio guide to make a more sophisticated tour but the bloody mass was too loud to concentrate on the explanations). Some of them were bare-feet and you could see the band-aid wrapped around toes, some were leaning to their walking sticks, and some had already decorated themselves with a scallop shell shaped necklaces (the emblem of St. James). Those who didn't wear hiking boots had already changed to more comfortable flip-flops; I was the only one decently dressed (with the exception of the local worshippers and some Spanish tourists). Some came with their biking gear (you're also allowed to do the route by bike, but they are considered as lower class pilgrims), the most unfit outfit for a church environment.


In the afternoon, I got to the cathedral again as the queue to the "Holy Door" had almost disappeared and I grasped the opportunity of seeing the crypt. On the way to the crypt (where somewhere in the back, behind a glass vitrine you could see a silver coffin presumably containing the last remains of St. James), the line of people walked through the main altar where the tired pilgrims have an opportunity to hug the golden statue of St. James. During the service, I had seen arms caressing the statue and now it was my turn to show some affection to St. James. But I wasn't in the spiritual state provoked by the lack of Facebook and the adrenaline-overdose after 600 km of walking alone. Luckily the girl before me didn't give a very effusive or cordial embrace either, so my panic attenuated and I was ready to step next to St. James. I peeked around and forced myself to tap Jamie in the shoulder (at this stage, I think I can call him just Jamie, as we pilgrims sometimes do).

Later in the evening, in a tapas bar, I had a conversation with a German and Australian pilgrims enjoying big glasses of white wine. I asked them about the spiritual side of the pilgrimage, the hugging of St. James, and about the practicalities of the camino. They were quite cynic about the whole spiritual searching during the route, for them, it was more about spending time alone (and they emphasized the necessity of doing the route alone!). Probably the idea of following the route of one of Jesus's 12 apostotles has less to do with religion than taking inspiration from Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist and other similar semi-philosophical best-sellers. But I guess it needn't to be that tacky either. However, I think I changed my mind about wanting to do this pilgrim route (even though the facilities on the route are good); in case I need a self-searching trip, I would choose a less-known path that would have a more meaningful end for a non-Catholic, non-religious person. Who says you can't find the meaning of your life by tasting port wines in Douro valley...

Road tripping in Portugal

This time, I will pretend to be an adventurous travel reporter; make sure you write down the secret travel tips (this is a cheap version of my dream of being a travel book author).

I arrived at Oporto in the evening. Though I didn't see the city in the day light and I just walked from the metro station to our great hostel up on a little hill, I felt it was one of those cities for which you immediately have a passion. It had an almost South American feeling with the people hanging around in the shadowy little alleys playing loudly some Portuguese versions of American pop songs. The next morning I could see the delightful tile decorated houses but also the run-down buildings exposing the relative poverty of the country. The port of the city was beautiful and on the other side of the river you could see the signs of big port wine companies. The city would deserve a couple of days to visit but we were in a hurry to see where all that port wine was grown. So we headed, following the orders of our TomTom, to the Douro valley area, East of Oporto.


#1. Oporto port and tile decorations.
#2. Hostel: Oporto Poets Hostel.

Exiting the highway we got the first glimpse of the beautiful Douro river and the hills growing sometimes to mountains following it all the way to Spain. The Alto Douro, where wine has been produced for 2000 years, is a Unesco world heritage site: "This long tradition of viticulture has produced a cultural landscape of outstanding beauty that reflects its technological, social and economic evolution." And when, kilometres after kilometres, you see the amazing terraces built on the steep hills to cultivate wine, you don't question this status. You are most likely to wonder why so many tourists have found the Tuscan wine region but not this wonderful landscape in the Northern Portugal.


#3. Alto Douro region.

We had our first stop in Peso da Régua and ate just by the rail tracks in a modern Portuguese restaurant with beuatiful portions and great sea food. Of course, I had bacalhau, the dried and salted cod fish, the most famous Portuguese food (though it is nowadays imported from Denmark and Norway). This was the food that kept Fernão de Magalhães and the other explorers of the New World alive during the long sailing trips.


#4. Castas e Pratas restaurant in Peso da Régua.

The whole area is full of quintas, or wine estates, where you can taste the locally produced wines and, more importantly, port wines. We had a stop at Quinta do Tedo owned by a French-Californian couple. They had just harvested their first organic grapes. The transformation to organic production had taken them four years but unfortunately we have to wait until next year to buy some organic port, still a rarity in the region. During a little tour we learnt about port wines (of course my travel companion had studied the whole topic beforehand so I got to pose all the stupid questions): port wine is produced from the grapes in the Douro region, it is a fortified wine meaning that fermentation is stopped by adding some grape spirit, like brandy, in it making it a sweet red wine. When starting the wine tasting, I nodded towards the spitting cup and whispered that we wouldn't probably need it but at the end we couldn't finish our glasses anymore. The tasting was free as my travel companion bought 6 bottles for 130 euros for his cave.




#5. Port wine tastings in small quintas.

The road (N222) from Régua to Pinhão is a beautiful route following the river but continuing to our agriturismo, or tourismo rural, on a very small serpentine road, we got to see the best views of the Douro. The sun was setting, colouring the hills into golden yellow, orange and red, and we understood the meaning of the name Douro, deriving from the Portuguese word for gold. Our accommodation for the next two nights was in the beautiful Quinta do Passadouro, where a Dutch couple had kept a B&B for nine years. We ate the dinner, again with some bacalhau, together with the other guests, all from the Netherlands. At the end, when enough wine had been tasted, the atmosphere started to be very cosy and even hilarious. The owner told us that in order to get the status of "tourismo rural" in Portugal, the owners had to eat with their guests every evening. She and her husband made turns and tonight it was her time. (We were wondering how their livers handled the dinners even every second day because there was no lack of wine.) I played offended: "Oh, so it's not because we are so charming that you're eating with us?" "No, I'm obliged", she replied a bit too fast and while she was partly joking as well, I later thought that she might have been honest, she wasn't very cordial towards us and she was the only thing that wasn't great about the place. But still, I recommend the place just for the great views, good food and excellent port wines.


#6. Quinta do Passodouro for staying for a couple of nights.

The next day we took the most wonderful route from our quinta to Sabrosa, home village of Magalhães (N323). It was a tiny road and I was sure that it would end abruptly at some point and we wouldn't be able to turn around. At moments, I was squeezing the door handle and refused to look around for the great views being afraid that I would see how close to the cliff we were. The vertigo struck me badly and I was relieved when we finally got to the safe road once again. But it was worth it.



#7. Little roads on the hills, like this N323 from Pinhão to Sambrosa.

Our next adventure wasn't. I had printed out a New York Times article that I recommend reading but not necessarily following blindly as we did. The journalist writes about the most breathtaking route in the area: "In no guidebooks did I see instructions on this particular route, and on no maps can I find what I’d need to give exact, unerring guidance about it. But if you head from Alijó in the direction of Favaios, then follow the first signs to Castedo, then turn left at the fountain in the centre of that village onto a narrow, bumpy road sloping sharply down toward Tua, you should have luck. Or you can always double back, try again and have luck the second or third time. It’s a small area. You can’t go too wrong for too long." We found the road quite easily, but what the journalist forgot to tell is that if you have a Seat Ibiza or whatever that is not a 4x4 you won't be able to make the road down to the river. We had troubles from the beginning but we insisted on trying; we hardly made it to the road because already the first turn was so small that we had to go backwards and forward and backwards again to wedge in. A Portuguese man was following our manoeuvre, probably knowing that nothing good will follow. Or maybe he had already seen some other NYT followers on the road. The route, or more precisely a path, was more than "bumpy", it was impossible. Though the views might have been nice, we were too concentrated on surviving and not scratching the car that the enjoyment of the landscapes was remote. Finally we made a demi-tour and returned to the village of Castedo. The car had a few scratches on the side but it wasn't until another dead-end road that we mashed the rear light altogether... (No photos were taken during this stressful detour!)

#8. Stay on the normal road and don't take everything NYT writes as god's word.

After many mistaken deviations we finally arrived to Tua by the river and had an excellent lunch in a local place where the communication was restrained to "pesca or carne". No menus were needed however, the women in the kitchen made us a great lunch from the local produces. By the way, I have to say that Italian tomatoes almost feel tasteless compared to the Portuguese ones. We had actually looked for another place recommended in our guide book, but I guess getting lost and finding your own places is always the funniest part of travelling (but maybe also the most challenging for keeping up the good spirit in the travel group).

Enoteca

I have to post something in honor of my enoteca.

I love my neighbourhood in Florence. I have my café, my pasta shop, my casalinga shop (where you buy all the possible house ware stuff from mosquito nets to parquet wax) and my enoteca. Signore Amadei is my wine seller and I appreciate him fondly. Already after my first wine purchase in the shop, he started greeting me in the street and welcomed me into his shop with such a cordiality that an unfamiliar Finn would feel suspicious.

Yesterday I went to buy red wine to go with French cheese. He remembered to ask how I had liked the last wine I had bought. A chianti classico, the famous Tuscan wine from the Chianti region. I had to admit that even if I'd love to like chianti classico, I just don't. He listened emphatically as if I was telling him that I'm anxious about wars and corrupted politics. "È molto tannico", he comforted me. Instead, he recommended a pinot nero from Alto Adige, Northern Italy, to go with the cheese aperitivo. "Anché Mozart è daccordo", he concluded referring to the classical music we were listening. As an unusual small talk he mentioned his love to classical music and thanked me for shopping in his enoteca. Where else would I go?

I'm more and more sceptical about the viability of the option of living in Finland. Am I strong enough to return to the land of state monopolised wine and clinic, brightly lit alcohol shops where shop assistants wear bordeaux red uniforms and try assure me that even the best wine companies don't use a real cork any more (they do in Italy and anywhere where wine is quasi-sacred!)? What will I do with my spare time if all the daily shopping can be done in one huge super market in the suburb of the city? When I can do my weekly sport activity by pushing the shopping cart filled with harmonised and standardized food hundreds and hundreds of metres in the cold corridors of the market? Why haven't the Finnish people already started a revolt against the cartel of two super market chains that makes grocery shopping faceless, expensive, annoying and inhuman? In Italy, most of the shopping is still done in individual little shops, or negozio, that value entrepreneurship and social and human contact in everyday life.

P.S. I forgot the bottle of pinot nero at home and had to buy a regular chianti from a night shop on the way to the cheese aperitivo. So that's it for my sophisticated wine shopping...

Corri La Vita - Running Against Cancer

In the beginning of September, after a welfare state related conference in Budapest, my Finnish colleagues run the Budapest half-marathon. I went to cheer on the runners and got immersed in the great sport atmosphere. DJ was playing samba and YMCA and excited runners ready to cross the city were shouting and cheering themselves as well. I wanted to be part of the group. Instead, while the thousands of runners left the park for their 20 km tour, I went to do my own tour in a nearby flee-market and had a beer in the fresh autumn air. I was obviously a second class tourist.

Feeling the adrenaline-filled atmosphere, I got inspired by the idea of running in such a mass happening myself, and when I saw the poster for Corri La Vita, 12km run in Florence to raise money for the fight against breast cancer, my opportunity had occurred. I went to sign up immediately to a closest sport shop. However, they had already closed the inscrizione and I left with two pairs of shorts instead making me even more motivated to run Corri La Vita.

The statue of Neptune in Piazza Signoria, the starting point of our run. All photos from here.

I have done jogging about five times this year so I felt I needed to do some emergency exercise to see if I was able to run 12km in the first place. So, I put on my new professional high-tech running shorts and a Harvard t-shirt that I was a bit embarrased to wear (yeah, no wonder some people think I'm Americana...). I run up to Piazzale Michelangelo and instead of doing my usual tour I continued up on the hill (beautiful!). It became dark and it started drizzling a bit, a car honked at me in the lonely street. I was almost sure that I had already got lost when I was suddenly back in Piazza Pitti. At home, quite dead but not dead, I checked out every runner's favourite web site Gmaps Pedometer and found out that I had run 11,3 km. I was ready for Corri La Vita.

Well, not quite. In Italy, you need a medical certificate proving you can do "agonistic sports" in order to participate in a running competition. I didn't have one so when I was signing-up (the second time, I managed to do it), I told that I wanted to do a non-competitive 12km run. Not possible (although their website said it was). I was only allowed to do a 5km passegiata. I don't know if I was disappointed or relieved. Sunday morning I still put my jogging stuff on (this time a Salvatore Ferragamo sponsored Corri La Vita t-shirt) and headed to Piazza Signoria. I asked two stuff members if I can run 12km fuori competizione; they didn't know. There was an announcement that I didn't understand but most probably it explained the organisational issues that I was desperately trying to figure out.


It was 9h35 when the shutgun finally announced the start of the competition. I was still trying to find out where I should start and if I was obliged to do the 5km family walk. I followed the masses of people and asked once again if I can run the longer distance. "Tutti lo fanno", replied the older man, so I was all set for the tour despite the poor (and excellent example of) Italian organisation.


It was great fun and running with 20 000 other people felt somehow very humble. We were all doing this insane agonistic sport and were connected by some weird solidarity. Those participating in the competition were far ahead of me and the people around me, so I mostly saw people taking it pretty easy, enjoying the sunny Sunday morning; rather smiling than grimacing out of agony. After a steep descent from Forte del Belvedere to San Niccolo we had to do a huge and equally steep ascent up to Piazzale Michelangelo (some grimaces were now visible). The best runners were already coming down from the hill when I started climbing up. 7km had passed and I wasn't the only one to walk up this hill (who ever thinks that Tuscan hills are charming should go jogging in this street).


My time was 1h10. The best woman arrived 30 minutes before me. But it didn't matter, I was glad to have made it, to have a discount coupon for La Perla lingerie and receive a Salvatore Ferragamo t-shirt (well, made in Haiti...). I'm actually thinking again of doing a half-marathon, though I liked the non-competitive character of Corri La Vita and the idea of collecting money for cancer rehabilitation (it collected 270 000 euros). Maybe I'll make it an annual tradition, a great excuse to come to Florence.

Paradoxal Florence

After a few hours of working on Sunday (and more hours spent on checking flight connections, comparing hotels, investing in social networking (which is just a fancier synonym for wasting time on internet), and reading news), I deserved a little Sunday passegiata aiming for a gelato. There was a 10-metre-long queue waiting for some good ice cream in one of my favourite gelaterias close to Duomo so I did a detour to a bookshop hoping that the gelato-hungry tourists would disappear in the meantime. I was already quite irritated by the tourist masses when I arrived at Piazza Duomo where my irritation turned into a depression. The Duomo is the most reknown symbol of Florence so it's normal that the piazza is overwhelmed by tourists the whole year around but today it just felt unbearable.

Sometimes, Florence feels like this!

I love the cathedral. It's an extraordinary piece of architecture and Brunelleschi's dome built in the early 15th century doesn't stop amazing me. You'll get the best view of the dome from the hills around the city centre, from the frog perspective it doesn't seem at all as imposing as it is in reality. The Battisterio next to the Duomo is also a wonderful building, and the oldest church in Florence (most probably ancient Florentines used to pray for Mars in this same place). Lorenzo Ghiberti's golden doors facing the Duomo are so beautiful that Michelangelo declared them as the gate to paradise. Until the end of the 19th century, all the Florentines got baptised in this building. And of course, il bello campanile, the 85m tall bell tower designed by the famous Reneissance painter Giotto. Obviously, I'm not the only one who wants to admire the piazza every now and then, and I have to admit that even after 3 years of close relation with the Duomo, I still look up to admire the dome and the campanile when I pass by. But it drives me crazy that I have to push my way through the tourist groups who are following a Spanish flag, a sunflower, an umberella, or whatever their tour guide is waving in the air. The city is ruined by the tourists, there's no doubt about that. My little visit to Bologna this week was refreshing in this sense. In comparison to Florence, there are basically no tourists.

View of the Duomo from Giardini di Bardini.

The gelateria was still busy when I returned from the book shop. In bad mood, I continued my way to another one. I crossed Piazza Signoria and was wondering if the tourists are more interested in taking funny photos of themselves with the statue of David than in the art and architecture of the city. Unfortunately, the most stupid tourists are also the most visible ones. In the corner of the Uffizi museum, a pantomimist was entertaining a small audience by making fun of the passers-by. I've always wondered that in these situations I would be wittier than the clown. Suddenly I turned my head and saw the guy on all fours, crawling behind me and peeping under my short skirt while the audience was laughing at my expense. I blushed, laughed and sent him a kiss in the air. After all the irritation, I was laughing myself about this tourist show until I found the next gelateria too busy as well.

Then suddenly, Florence can turn into this!

I returned to my own neighbourhood behind Santa Croce. There's an amazing change in atmosphere when you cross to the Eastern side of Via Verdi. Tourists somehow disappear and you start hear Italian language once again. I got my artisanal ice cream next to my place. Cioccolato alla canella and pistacchio. Satisfied.

Mercato delle Pulci

Piazza dei Ciompi between Santa Croce and Sant'Ambrogio is a cosy square that hosts my favourite antique market the last Sunday of every month. The municipality of Florence was about to eradicate the whole market at some point for what ever reason but after one year of campaigning, the future seems to be more secured at the moment, and hopefully so, because this market is one of the greatest things in Florence.

Yesterday, I bought a pair of beautiful earrings that according to the seller were from the late 19th century, ottocento, – and even if they weren't, they are still gorgeous and unique. The whole market is full of stuff I could buy, from furniture to old jewellery (or Playboy magazines from the 1970s with Sophia Loren showing her very hairy private parts). Most importantly, you just enjoy the beautiful and curious objects and the hot autumn sun.