15 Ottobre
Please join me in laughing at my lack of Italian inner domestic goddess-ness:
At 6:30pm, I loaded my apartment’s washing machine with all of my darks. It is 10:23pm and the washer light remains lit, the door locked, and not a thing happening to the clothes inside. What the hell setting did I put it on? I even have my drying racks all lined up, but I can’t get the damn clothes out.
The washing machine is installed in the kitchen, under the counter top gas burners. This is all very compact and cute, until you spill washing detergent on your gas burners and across your countertop. And so, in check with my non-domestic goddess status, it’s a good thing I’m not doing much in the way of cooking.
Which leads me to very important news…
I have discovered my official go-to drinking and eating establishment. I Fratellini.
I hate to quote a guidebook, but...
”Just off the busiest tourist thoroughfare lies one of the last of a dying breed: a fiaschitteria (derived from the word for flask of wine). It’s the proverbial hole in the wall, a doorway about 5 feet deep with rows and rows of wine bottles against the back wall and Armando and Michele Perrino busy behind the counter, fixing sandwiches and pouring glasses of vino. You stand munching and sipping on the cobblestones of the narrow street surrounded by Florentines on their lunch break and a few bemused tourists.”
I sat on the cobblestone during lunch today, drinking brunello, people watching while avoiding being shit on by a pigeon, and well, found my little slice of Florentine heaven. And one of the more excellent ways to head into siesta…
19 Ottobre
I got a 93% on my Italian test! I received an “ottimo” and have graduated to elementary Italian, Level 3. I still cannot really speak in a store or a restaurant, but apparently, my grammatical knowledge of the “passato prossimo” and “pronomi diretti” is well, ottimo. And I only cheated a little bit.
My father arrived in Firenze this afternoon. In honor of his arrival, and the final evening in my Ponte Vecchio apartment, I hosted a proper cocktail party. This really translates to: a perfect excuse to go from butcher to cheese stand to vegetable stand with actual reason to buy. One of the more fun hours I have spent in recent memory.
I enrolled in a third week of school before I leave for the farm on the 28th, and so, will be moving into my dad and Kims apartment on Villa Della Vigna Nuova for the upcoming week. From NYC to Florence, seems as though we are the 2007 version of Three’s Company.
Additional waiters and bar-men befriended this week:
Giuseppe.
Francesco.
Armando.
22 Ottobre
I have just returned from my third consecutive day of a due bottiglia di vino lunch. Allora! My father must be in town!
What am I ever going to do if my schedule doesn’t include vino rosso from 2pm until, well, the end of the evening?
It is the start of my third week in Florence, and it’s beginning to feel very intimate and cozy here. I fairly confidently know my way around town, and am loving when Italians stop to ask me for directions. I can’t answer them all that well, but the mere question gives me an extra little spring in my step.
This morning marked the beginning of Elementary Italian, Part 3. School and I are really starting to hit it off. 10 of us from the last session all moved together to the next level, and we have two new teachers who I think are brilliantly dramatic and patient and wise. We are the oddest group of 10 (I think it bad luck to delve into particular individual’s oddities until I’ve at least left Florence…stay tuned…) but it’s an oddness that creates one of the more endearing, supportive & comedic dynamics. We sit around a small conference table, and absolutely not one word of English is to be uttered. I make a lot of facial expressions and exclaiming of “oy” - a substitution that I declare universal and completely acceptable.
The weekend was filled with everything cultural that happens outside of museum or church walls. Molto shopping, eating, wandering, and people watching. I could write a separate novel on how to navigate a car from Florence to Siena, but alas, I will leave pedestrian hopping and winding roads to your imagination. We drove to Siena Saturday morning to eat lunch at a restaurant that is a favorite of the papa’s. We drank delicious wine that was accompanied by one of the more graceful, beautiful decanting presentations by a waiter I have ever witnessed. Siena is truly lovely. Unbelievably quaint, intricately designed, friendly, lively, and for lack of a better description, extraordinarily pleasing to eye and the soul.
For future reference, please note: After lunch (and two bottles of Brunello), my father is excellent to go shopping with. It goes something like this: Dad picks out women’s clothes that he wishes he could wear, and instead (thankfully) hands them to you to try on. It is best if in this situation, you a) ask very few questions and b) just go with it. Try on the clothes, and, if they fit, you will most like become the owner of them. Cashmere and tweeds are the new olive picking fashion, si?
We spent Sunday morning in Fiesole – a hill town just north of Firenze. Again, I could share more car stories, but again, the lunch and the wine and breathtaking views were much less stressful and much more interesting.
Since we clearly haven’t been eating enough, last night I escorted my roomie’s to my favorite bar for apertivo. Good drinks, good music, and single men everywhere. Though one may consider a father to be an obstacle in respects to the manhunt, I officially declare my father to be an excellent wingman. Stay tuned for how he progresses with his newly assigned wingman duties. Five days left in Florence with a language to master and a date to be had.
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5 comments:
And to confirm-- the above description of papa's shopping MO is indeed quite true...as I have been the the other daughter lucky enough to have been in my sister's said post-lunch-vino-shop-a-rama position. Its damn fun...and I hope they don't forget that Philly girls need cashmere and tweed too...
It is also important to note: padre is an excellent wingman. Not necessarily the kind of wingman you would want if you were in the WingBowl, but a bar, shopping, restaurant, manhunt wingman is totally in his job description. Additionally, although your drive to siena sounds like it had some twists and turns, it in no way comes close to the time that mom and I couldn't figure out how to, in fact, drive into siena through one of its open walls, and upon departing siena, got so ridiculously lost that mom made a 3-point turn on a back tuscan road and proceeded to almost back our Renault down a cliff. Thank god for the lovely italian woman who gave us directions thereafter.
Actually, one last question-- I assume you are chrissy (I'll lend you the wig from '86) and kim is janet?!
Oh! The memories this brings back! The days of standing alone in our little Munich apartment, me the Enormous Pregnant Wife at home to tend the domestic fires while Sam the Breadwinner was off saving the world from bad design.
9 a.m. one January morning saw me standing in our tiny galley kitchen, gazing at a highly efficient German machine with much admiration. 10 a.m. saw me standing in front of same machine cursing in every language I could think of, endangering the health of my unborn child with a blood pressure somewhere near 4000.
Although enormous blame was hurled at the Nazi-German regime for inflicting this machine on me, I mostly railed at the luddite American appliance gods who refused to adopt modern technology and thus had left me in this state of ignorance with respect to front-loading-auto-lock- 13-cycles-but-no-ON-button machines.
Eventually I figured it out, but I think we washed Grace's diapers at 300 degrees for the first few weeks.
while we're on the subject of cashmere and tweed, let us not forget the "EX".
Siena- the nice woman we asked directions-gave up cause we couldn't speak Italiano and she couldn't speak English so she DROVE us to Siena. Molto fab!!!!
is 'papa' looking to adopt another daughter perhaps? you can never buy too many clothes!
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