Florence, Fall 2023

We arrived in Florence a week ago in the evening, after an uneventful but still long and tiring three-leg trip from Jackson via Chicago (five-hour layover) and Munich (two-hour layover). As our taxi from the Florence airport arrived at the apartment, we were met by one of the pair of agents who manage the rentals; she showed us around, gave us the keys and instructions as to the trickiness of using them, and made sure that the wifi connection worked for us. When she left, we went to the nearest grocery store, one which we have used in at least two other stays in the Oltrarno area south of the river Arno, and got a small number of items for breakfasts and snacks. It has been our intention to go to restaurants for lunch and dinner.

The apartment is the lower two floors of a medieval tower, each floor with a footprint of roughly 22'x24'. We have been told by different sources (the VRBO website and the apartment's book of useful information) that the building is from the fourteenth century (i.e., the century leading up to 1400) and from the quattrocento (i.e., the period whose Italian numbers begin with from "millequattrocento," one thousand four hundred -- 1400 to 1499). The agent was not sure which was correct. In either case, it's a pretty old building. There are several such towers in this immediate area, each roughly seven stories high and apparently built for defense, with thick walls and tall enough to espy an enemy some distance away, whether approaching by land or by river.

The entrance is through a small private courtyard, off a pedestrian alley separating this tower from another tower next to it, and the VRBO listing counts the area of the courtyard in its measure of the apartment. As its potential usefulness is highly weather-dependent and it has rained most of our stay so far, I don't count it in. The father of one of the agents seems to help them as a handyman from time to time, and he planted some cyclamen in the two planters in the courtyard, replacing plants that died during the hot weather earlier. The agent suggested to us that it would be nice to have breakfast out there, but so far the rainy weather has militated against that pleasant image.

The apartment looks really good in pictures on the VRBO website, and indeed in reality when one arrives at the unoccupied space. It's only when one unpacks and starts looking for places to put things that the place gets messy very fast. Here's our bedroom when it was pristine.

Having been given several airline meals along the way to Florence, and being more tired than hungry, we went straight to bed the first night, waking up around noon on Tuesday and having a light brunch. I think it was raining then--it has rained every day since we've been here, some days only a brief drizzle and others a downpour. We stayed in all afternoon before a short walk to a local restaurant that was one of our favorites in prior years; this time it was still fine but we didn't like it quite so much as previously. We had a brief exploratory walk on the way back to the apartment.