Grab Bag #2: Glorious Food

(A series of other things I intended to write about while I was away but didn't have time to do)

We had decided not to do much cooking on this stay, which was a good thing, because the kitchen was very small and minimally equipped; the under-counter refrigerator had no freezer section and on occasions when ice might have been nice to have for a sore knee or back, or to cool a beverage, no ice was available. We could keep breakfast items there with no problem--yogurt, fruit juice, some kinds of fruit and berries, cold cuts, bready items--and for the first week or so we were getting lunch at local restaurants, but then we decided we were eating much too much and should have smaller luches, so we cut way back on the number and size of courses consumed per day, and lunches became olives, marinated artichoke hearts, deli-sliced sausages, schiacciata a couple of times. We got things from the deli counter that were pre-wrapped, or asked for an etto of this or that. (An etto is a tenth of a kilo, about three and a half ounces.)

For dinner, though, we went to restaurants every night, reasonably nice places that Steve had scouted out and read the menus of in the course of his long walks. All were within a walking distance of fifteen minutes or so and some were considerably closer. A couple of them were sort of splurges. A couple of others were a bit disappointing, but most were good, some very good.

Our favorites were Logó, Il Santo Bevitore, and the excellent fish restaurant Pozzo Toscanelli. (It is located on Via Toscanella, and jocularly named after a fifteenth-century Italian mathematician and astronomer named Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who provided Columbus with the map of the world that he used on his first voyage. Also pozzo means well or spring, so it's an appropriately watery term for a fish restaurant, and the name is doubly witty.)

On our last day, after we'd pretty much packed everything up in the morning, we went up to Fiesole, the small hill town to the northeast of Florence, taking a taxi up and the bus back down after lunch. It was a cloudy and partly rainy day, so the views were not the incentive. We had no particular place in mind for lunch, but we wandered a bit and not finding anything we asked someone where there were any good restaurants. She directed us back to the town square; we had walked up one side of it earlier, but the other side of it was where we found a really lovely place with a very unassuming front. It's called Bistro al 5, and if you're ever there, we recommend it. Very short menu--maybe four choices for each course--but very refined, beautifully presented and delicious.