CHAPTER 28: VICENZA, ITALY
Wednesday, November 24

President Clinton visited Florence on Sunday for a European summit meeting. Air Force One flew right over our heads into the Pisa airport, which is about a mile from our room. Janis and I were wondering if he flew in to Pisa so he could stay in high-class accommodations like ours, but figured that, if he did, he would probably get the one room that had no rust in the bath tub. (Hey, he and Hillary could get the double bed, and Chelsea could sleep on the "couch" thingie. Why not?) But we didn't hear any banging of the headboard on the wall, so we decided that he was probably staying somewhere else.

We went into Florence on Monday. We wanted to see the Uffizi Gallery, which has one of the most important art collections in the world. It turns out that the Uffizi is closed on Mondays. Okay, no problem, we'll go over to the Palazzo Pitti, which has another important collection and also a showing of Edvard Munch's work. Uh oh, it was closed too. How about the Accademia del Arte? Closed. Damn! So Janis wanted to do some shopping, but we discovered that all the stores were closed, closed, closed. Florence was DEAD. Turns out that, unlike every other city in Europe, it's bustling on Sundays and closed on Mondays. It was a beautiful day, too. So we left Florence and drove back to Pisa, did some chores, then I went out to do some drawing and driving. I found a wonderful road near our hotel that went by an old castle and village clustered on a small hilltop, then up and over a mountain. I discovered that, from the top, you could see all the way to Florence. As I was coming down the mountain, the sun was setting. Looking to the west I could see a red and pink sky, with the same colors reflected in the Arno River as it wound its way through Pisa and on to the sea. It was one of those sublime moments that stays with you forever.

We went back to Florence on Tuesday and had much better luck with places being open. The Uffizi Gallery was excellent for early Renaissance art. The gallery itself is on the fourth floor of an old building. No elevators, of course (duh: they didn't have elevators in them days!), so we had to walk all the way up and down. It was a bit smaller than I expected, but all the art was first-rate. Afterwards, we had lunch, then went over to the Palazzo Pitti, which turned out to be huge. It used to be the home of the Medici family and the rulers of Florence. Now it's a museum. The Edvard Munch exhibit was small but well done. The palace gallery was really a succession of rooms absolutely stuffed with paintings. I couldn't really determine any rhyme or reason to their arrangement, other than "hey, there's some wall space, let's put a painting there!". There were a number of the Big Guys (Rubens, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, etc) and tons and tons of Florentine and Tuscan artists you never heard of. I was oversaturated with art by the time we left.

The only problem with the Palazzo Pitti was that we had to walk across the Ponte Vecchio to get there. This is the famous old bridge that's also home to a bunch of jewelry stores. Suffice it to say, Janis had a field day, both coming and going.

Our farewell dinner in Florence was, well, memorable. We found a small restaurant just outside the tourist area. The food was okay, but the people running the restaurant were Lost in Space. One old lady in particular was wandering slowly around the place, changing this, adjusting that, in no particular pattern, wearing an expression like she was trying real hard to concentrate on something, but the fourteen Qualudes she'd taken kept getting in the way. I watched her go up to a table that had two glasses on it and flip the tablecloth to adjust it, which knocked one of the glasses to the floor and broke it. She stood there for a moment trying real hard to concentrate, then deliberately flipped it again to send the other one crashing to the floor. Then she wandered around the restaurant for another half hour, adjusting this and that, everything EXCEPT the two broken glasses on the floor, which were finally cleaned up by one of the others. The only patrons were ourselves and a couple of American women at the next table, and we were all fascinated by this floor show. We both decided to skip it, though, the next time we were in Florence!

As we were heading back to the parking garage, we ran into a large group of shouting men. A guy in a leather jacket and holding a police baton accosted me. I went into defensive mode and shoved past him real quick, only to realize that this guy was a cop and he was trying to stop me from going someplace I really didn't want to go, which was right into a very noisy crowd of British roughnecks. It turned out that the Manchester United soccer team was playing the Florence team that evening, these British guys were soccer hooligans, and the local cops were making sure they were.... umm, "taken care of". We got out of there real quick! Janis reminded me, as we were driving out of town, that our Range Rover has British tags on it, not the kind we wanted at that particular moment!

We packed up last night and left Pisa this morning. We'd had enough of our high-class accommodations and wanted to see Venice, which was too far away for a day trip. So we drove to the American base at Vicenza, Italy, and are now staying in their hotel, the Ederle Inn. This place is really nice. It even won the Best Inn in the Army. I would have thought that the "Best Inn in the Army" would be a new tent with clean plywood decking and a dry cot. But no, the Ederle Inn is quite all right. It is fairly new, has large clean rooms, nice beds, and no rust in the bathtubs. Tomorrow we're going to Venice. We'll be here until Saturday, when we're going to start our trek to Spain.

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