Highlights-Florence Day 4

This was the Tour the Uffizi day. Glad I rested up for it because it is an endurance test. I was in the line for 8:15a timed entry and didn’t exit the gift shop with my fridge magnet of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus until 1215 (the only thing in the shop that fits in my bag except a pencil and I don’t use them). You have to show your ID with your ticket. Why? Probably Italian law or to combat some scam that my non-criminal brain can’t imagine. I may be overdoing the “it’s the law” presumption, but it is more charitable than “they’re idiots.” There are lots of “heads on torsos, no arms” sculptures. Something in the corresponding didactic panels (those signs that explain what you’re looking at) caught my attention: “The head is not germane to the body.” What is a germane head? The non-museum curator speak version: “The statue didn’t have a head when we found it in the dirt so we stuck one on and made it fit.” Whisper boxes (why are they called that when no one whispers into them?) are required for guided tours, but they don’t help in the Botticelli room (“Birth of Venus” and other works). There are so many guides and the un-guided talking at once that the room sounds like a tin shed at the state fair. Silent contemplation of Renaissance art isn’t possible when it sounds like you’re in line for a beer at a sports stadium. The far end of the U-shaped Uffizi offered splendid views of the Arno river, if you can get people to stop taking selfies in front of the window. One man was standing for such a prolonged period gazing toward the Ponte Vecchio that the guy behind him gave up waiting for him to move. He positioned himself right behind him and curved his arm around him to get the shot he wanted. I’m surprised the man in contemplation didn’t slap at it. You can learn if the hand dryers in the bathrooms do their job by observing people coming out. If you see women waving their hands like leaves on a tree on a fall windy day or men wiping their hands on their pants, you know what’s coming. I consumed the morning pastry that arrived without a fork with some trepidation. One would think it isn’t accompanied by a fork because it could be held. Wrong-o. After one or two bites, I’ve learned that the structure collapses and transforms the elegant-in-the-display-case pastry to a sticky (still tasty) blob in your hand. As I was eating my pastry with the tiny spoon that comes to stir sugar into one’s coffee, one of the customers at the counter caught my attention. It was one of those people (you know, “those people”) who wear their pants significantly below the traditional male belt line. Something struck me as I tried desperately to look away. I have never seen a young male wearing pants this way with a date or female friend. Never. If this pants-wearing style is designed as a signaling device for members of the opposite sex, they appear to be sending them in the other direction. Male peacock feather displays may be over the top, but they work.