Over the last week or so, I have been posting detailed accounts of some of the things Alex and I did while we were in Italy last month.  This is the last post in the series; you can read the first one here and the second one here.

As I have mentioned previously, I scoured my fair share of travel guides before we headed out on our trip to Florence.  Beside the sights we wanted to make sure we saw, I also had a list of potential restaurants/cafes we might try.  You can never research too much!  But once we arrived in Italy, all the careful studying of books flew out the window when it came to food.  We did not set foot in a single restaurant I had read about in a book.  Instead, we relied heavily on word of mouth, from both locals and fellow tourists.

So in this final post about our trip, I’m going to tell you about our experiences with several restaurants in Florence.  I’m highlighting the three best places we went to, but please note: we really did not find a BAD place to eat in Florence.  Some of the trattorias in high-traffic areas were a bit lackluster, but nothing was unpalatable.

Our very first night in Florence we wound up going to a vineria only a few feet down the road from our hotel.  The vineria was called Mangiafoco Cafe, located on Lungarno Acciaiuoli, and it was recommended to us by the hotel desk clerk.

We basically stumbled into Mangiafoco, exhausted and starving after our trek across the Atlantic.  There was no one else in the restaurant – just us and the couple of employees.  And while it is a restaurant, it is also a wine bar… which turned out to be a very cool thing for us.  You see, the owner of the vineria struck up a conversation with us while we sat there, barely awake and sipping our very first glasses of wine in Europe, and we got 2 cool bonuses out of the conversation.  The first one was that he decided to make us a special “Tuscany sampler plate” instead of giving us the menu to choose from, because he thought it would be nice for us to try all the local specialties on our first night in Italy.  So he brought us this:

It’s a bunch of prosciutto, salami, pears, and 3 ages of pecorino cheese.  We also got fig jelly, ice wine jelly, and Tuscan bread and olive oil with the platter.  It was delicious!  The second cool thing this guy gave us was information about chianti wines.  In 2003 Tuscany had a lot of rain.  More rain than Tuscany had had in a while, or has had since.  As a result, 2003 chiantis are some of the best you can get.  Of course, this is one man’s opinion.  Alex and I have sought out 2003 chianti since returning home, though, and I’ve got to say there is something different about that year.

We got a bit more adventurous our second night in Florence, buoyed mostly by the advice of a couple we met on our Tuscan countryside tour that afternoon.  They told us 2 things: 1) the Oltrarno/Santo Spirito part of Florence has the best, most authentic restaurants, and 2) if a restaurant in Florence isn’t at least half full, you shouldn’t bother eating there.  That was the criteria we used when we walked into Trattoria Mamma Gina.  This place is on Borgo S. Jacopo in the Oltrarno/Santo Spirito section, and it was reasonably crowded, even at an early dinner hour.

A couple of notes on Mamma Gina’s: the menu is in Italian.  I know that sounds scary, but if you’ve eaten in a reasonable number of upscale Italian restaurants in the US, you will be fine!  Tortellini and Marsala in English are the same when translated into Italian.  Every restaurant in Tuscany expects you to drink chianti, so that is what we did.  I ordered a tortellini dish, which was absolutely delicious, while Alex ordered a chicken dish that basically amounted to the Tuscan version of chicken parmigiana.  (Yes, I teased him about going all the way to Italy to eat chicken parm for a few weeks after we got back.)  We even ordered dessert, a panna cotta-type dish.

This was probably the best meal we had on our trip, and it was also the most entertaining meal we had.  Once we finished eating and our plates were cleared, the waiter tried to serve us more food… twice.  The first time the food belonged to another table, but he was very concerned about the fact that we appeared to have no food as we turned him away.  Alex  tried to explain that we already ate, even told him what we’d had, but something must have gotten lost in translation, because 5 minutes later the guy showed up again… with round two of our dinners!  This misunderstanding got cleared up, but we felt pretty bad for the poor guy!

The other place I’d recommend checking out if you’re ever in Florence is called Goldenview Open Bar Ristorante.  It’s just across Ponte Vecchio, in the Oltrarno/Santo Spirito area.  I had noticed it always looked crowded a couple of times when we were wandering around, so on our last night in Italy we decided to try getting in.  We must have arrived just in time, because not only did they seat us immediately, but they also gave us a sweet table:

You can see the view just past the wine bottle, the restaurant is right on the Arno River!  The sun set as we ate our dinner, which was the best way I could have imagined spending our last night.  After a trip filled with chianti, chianti, and more chianti, I decided I wanted to try a different Italian wine… so I ordered a bottle of Barolo.  Let me just tell you all something… if you go to Tuscany and order anything other than chianti, they will look at you like you have grown two extra heads and a leg out of your belly button… and the new appendages are purple with orange polka dots.  Our waiter was very cool – he was Italian, but had recently spent some time in Queens, where he had learned about The Cheesecake Factory.  It was a bit surreal, actually, to be sitting at a nice restaurant in Italy, speaking with an Italian about an American chain restaurant that had made a huge impression on him.

The food at Open Bar was OK.  I ordered a risotto special and Alex decided to brave Florentine steak:

Florentine steak is basically a porterhouse, but it’s a big deal in Florence (and by big, I mean BIG), so he figured one of us better give it a try before we went home.  Neither item was terribly impressive, but the wine was, as were the service and the view.  Oh, and the bathroom!  It was made of marble.  I still can’t get over that.

Perhaps you find it strange that I have yet to mention gelato in any of my posts about the trip.  Some people would tell you that you simply cannot go to Italy without having gelato everyday.  There is a reason for that.  You can get gelato EVERYWHERE, just like coffee and wine.  I tried 4 different flavors, and I loved them all.  But I can’t remember a darn thing about where we were when I got those gelatos, so I can’t recommend any gelaterias!

If I haven’t said it before, I will say it now… Alex and I loved Italy, and we will definitely be heading back as soon as we can swing it!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

This is the second in a three-part series of posts about the trip Alex and I took to Italy last month.  My intention is to share the details of a few experiences we had and places we went, none of which were mentioned in travel guides we consulted prior to going.  The first post, which you can read by clicking here, was about Boboli Gardens.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I have caught a lot of crap for not being more open with people about the trip Alex and I took to Florence, Italy last month.  I guess I didn’t give as many details as some people would have liked – I don’t know.  In response to the griping, I’m going to be doing a 3 blog series highlighting a few of the things we did/places we saw during our short stay in Italy.

Topic One: We watched a thunderstorm douse the city of Florence from a hilltop in the Boboli Gardens.

What I find terribly amusing about this is that we did not plan to go to Boboli Gardens.  It wasn’t on our short list at all.  And, yes, I did have a short list.  I did a ton of research on Florence before we set foot on Italian soil. Boboli Gardens was just a blip on the recommended itineraries of all the guides books.  There are simply too many fabulous things to see in Florence.  Of all the books I read this was the best one, and if you are intending to travel to Florence and Tuscany I’d highly recommend picking it up:

Alex and I ventured across the Arno River for lunch one afternoon (the one time we ate pizza in Italy), and wandered down a street and straight into the enormous Pitti Palace, the residence of the Medici family starting in 1550.  My mom had mentioned that she’d seen the Gardens when she went to Florence a couple of years ago, so we bought tickets (you have to pay to see ANYTHING in Italy) and went into the Palace.

It’s a bit confusing once you’re in the Palace.  It houses 6 museums, the Palace itself, and Boboli Gardens.  There are signs pointing you in the general direction of things that don’t really seem to be in that direction.  But we made it out the back of the Palace and into the Gardens.  That’s when we learned that they trick you into the Boboli Gardens.  Maybe I just didn’t read carefully enough, but no one mentioned the sheer vertical staircases you’d have to climb to see anything!  Sure, they tease you with a famous statue here, an obelisk there, but you know it’s not the reason you’re there.  And it’s not just one or two staircases.  It’s more like 10, and it felt like 20.  Just when we thought it was not even a little bit worth the price of admission, or the unexpected workout, we reached the top.  We were hot and sweaty and out of breath, but we were at THE TOP.

When we turned around to see where we’d come from, we saw this:

Suddenly it was worth it.  And then the coolest thing that could have happened, happened.  It started to rain over Florence.

We got to watch the lightning and the downpours from a dry and sunny spot under a tree, because our hike had taken us that far up and away from Florence.  Satisfied, we wandered the rest of the Gardens, to find they seem to mark the place where “Florence the city” ends and “Tuscany the countryside” begins.  This was the view looking the opposite way of the view I showed above:

I honestly feel as though any review or account I give of anything in Italy will not be doing it justice.  My pictures don’t do it justice.  However, here is something that adds value to a personal account like this: there was NO LINE to see the panorama of Florence, or anything else, in Boboli Gardens!!!  I cannot tell you how golden a piece of information this is.  Alex and I never made it up the Duomo because the line was always so long that we feared we’d miss out on all the other things we wanted to see that day.  Boboli Gardens has a beautiful alternate view if you’re short on time like we were.  No travel guides tell you that – perhaps in a veiled way they do, but it’s certainly not presented as a ‘instead of that, do this,’ kind of way.

Plus, you can watch a thunderstorm.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

We’ve been back from Italy for a week now, and I’ve been meaning to write a post about it.  Really, I have!  Other things have just gotten in my way – like work, and parties, and thank you note writing.  I have decided it’s a good thing I didn’t write a post about the trip right away, because it took a while for it to actually set in that we had gone to Italy at all.

I’m not going to bore you with a list of the things we did, the places we saw, or the foods we ate.  Suffice it to say, we saw a lot of amazing things, and ate some delicious meals.  For example, here is a picture of our favorite piazza, Piazza della Signoria:

Who wouldn’t love a piazza full of statues of naked men?!  As another example, here is the sample platter the owner of a local wine bar made us our first night in Florence:

Clockwise from 12 o’clock on this platter you see young Pecorino cheese, medium-aged Pecorino cheese, and well-aged Pecorino cheese, local olives, local pears, prosciutto, traditional salami, and Tuscan salami (which is softer and has fennel in it).  There are also 2 locally-made jams on the plate: sweet white wine and fig.

Yup, that’s right, I went to Italy and all I have to talk about are naked men statues and food!

That’s not really true.  Our trip was very interesting.  It got off to a really interesting start.  It took us over 13 hours to arrive in Florence, and when we walked into our hotel to check-in, we were informed that the hotel was full because of the large pharmaceutical convention going on in town.  I had confirmed the reservation only 2 weeks before, so Alex and I looked at each other with identical “oh crap, now what do we do” expressions.  But the gentleman only let us freak out for about 30 seconds before explaining that there had been some sort of computer glitch, and that they (Vivahotel Laurus al Duomo) were taking care of the mistake by putting us up in a nicer, more expensive, hotel across town.  He even went outside and hailed a cab for us, then paid the driver to take us to the new hotel.  And it turned out he wasn’t lying to get us out of his hair.  We wound up dropped off in front of the Hotel Berchielli, unsure what our reception was going to be.  Our apprehensions were unfounded, though, because we were checked in immediately and brought to our room, where we discovered our view was this:

Not too shabby!  The hotel was very nice, too, we were thoroughly impressed and happy with our experience.

Something Alex and I were quite surprised by was how happy the Italians were to have American tourists in Florence.  We were told over and over again that they haven’t been getting many Americans, and we were always treated very well.  Also interesting to us was that the only Americans we met were from the New York area.  And the people we met were always really friendly – which backs up my belief that New Yorkers really get a bad rap, because we are generally much friendlier than we are given credit for.  We even ran into one couple twice – first on our wine tour of the Chianti region, and then at a little restaurant in the Oltrarno section of Florence where we stopped to have pizza for lunch one afternoon.

All in all, Alex and I will definitely be heading back to Italy as soon as we can swing it!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

You may or may not know this: 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy.

What, you may wonder, does that mean?

Well, in 1609, two major events in the history of astronomy occurred: Galileo Galilei  first pointed his telescope at the night sky, and Johannes Kepler published his laws of planetary motions.  If you do the math, 1609 was precisely 400 years ago this year.  So to celebrate these huge moments in science, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and UNESCO have organized a global celebration in their honor.  Now, I am aware that the IAU is the organization responsible for the demotion of Pluto, but I have decided to forgive them for that.

There are all sorts of interesting projects being done in this International Year of Astronomy.  And why not?!  Galileo is the person credited with realizing there are craters on the Moon, moons around Jupiter (ever wonder why Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io are called Galilean moons?), rings around Saturn – although he didn’t know they were rings – and phases of the planet Venus.  You could say Galileo is kind of a big deal.  Which makes it appropriate that one of the projects I’ve read about is a local school making a model of the solar system to scale, that stretches across their entire town.  It shows just how big the solar system is… which ought to give people a feel for how incomprehensibly huge the universe is. 

Another part of the International Year of Astronomy is Space Day.  I believe Space Day is celebrated every year, it’s just that this year it is bigger because of IYA.  May 1, 2009 is Space Day. 

For my part, I have been trying to honor the International Year of Astronomy in a few ways.  I have made it a point to attend as many public observatory events as possible.  That’s something I would do anyway, but it feels more important this year.  I have also made a more concerted effort to track my own observations when I use my telescope.  I have a special, designated Moleskine notebook for this very purpose.  I also take pictures through my telescope as often as the weather allows.  I intend to spend Space Day watching the sunset with my fabulous boyfriend, then heading to WestConn’s observatory for their public night, then hopefully using my own binoculars to check out the things I don’t get to see there.  Finally, I happen to be traveling to Florence, Italy this year.  Florence is where Galileo did most of his work!  It is a happy coincidence, the trip was not planned to include Florence for this reason, but it’s kind of cool anyway!

Hopefully now that I have made everyone aware of this year’s astronomical significance, more people will try to “look up” from time to time!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Welcome to another installment of what Whitney and I are calling ‘collective blogging.’ To refresh everyone’s memory, we will both be writing blog entries on the same topic every week as an exercise to see how different our thought processes and memories are. Hopefully it will be good practice for an idea we have for NaNoWriMo 2009 – to write the same novel, but separately.

Today’s Topic: Explanations of Mutual Items on Our Bucket Lists

If you read my blog and Whitney’s blog last week, you know that we both posted lists of 75 things we’d each like to do before we ‘kick the bucket.’  If you read the two lists closely, you may have noticed that as good friends as we are, Whitney and I had few mutual life goals.  In keeping with the spirit of collective blogging, I will now explain my reasons for including the items that appeared on her list as well as mine.  If you go here, you will see that Whitney has done the same thing.

Item #3: Publish a book. 

For me, this was one of the most obvious goals to have in life.  I suspect that many people list being a published author as a goal when they are making lists like this, but most of them never pursue it.  Not me.  I’m pursuing it.  I have Whitney to thank for that, because she talked me into participating in NaNoWriMo 2007.  I’ve always liked to write, and from what I’ve been told over the years, I’m better than average at it.  “A writer,” was my standard answer to the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” from the age of 6 until the age of 15 – at which point it switched to wanting to be the first female President of the United States, which is really a whole separate blog.  Publishing a book would not only fulfill a dream I’ve had since childhood, it would also validate my participation in the craziness that is NaNoWriMo.  Besides, being able to say, “I’m a published author,” is just cool.

Item # 71: Set foot in all 50 states.

The United States is so incredibly diverse in terms of natural beauty, weather, and culture that I believe it might take a lifetime to see everything this country has to offer.  Because of that, I have had to narrow down the specific places in the U.S. that I would like to spend any length of time visiting.  However, I still want to one day say I have at the very least passed through all 50 states.  It just strikes me as something every American should do.  How can you truly appreciate international locations if you can’t appreciate domestic ones?  (For the record, so far I have been in 16 out of 50 states, plus Washington, DC and Puerto Rico.)

Item # 51: See the pyramids in Egypt.

OK, doesn’t everyone want to see the pyramids, at least in theory?  They are almost mythical (mummies, treasure), and yet they are tangible, you can see them if you really want to.  Moreover, one of the pyramids at Giza is the only member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still in existence.  There is incredible history locked in the pyramids in Egypt.  And if those aren’t enough reasons for me to want to go, here is another: for a month at age 9, I was convinced that I was reincarnated from an ancient Egyptian girl.  I didn’t know which one, but I was sure of it.  Then it was explained to me that I was Catholic and not supposed to believe in reincarnation, and I decided I was probably wrong about my connection to ancient Egypt.  But it has held a special place in my heart since then, so if one day it becomes possible to travel to Egypt, I would certainly go!

Item # 45: Take an Alaskan cruise and walk on a glacier.

This is a new life goal for me.  I traditionally avoid going anywhere that is colder than the climate I live in.  Alaska definitely qualifies as a place I would never go, if using that criterion.  However, glaciers are awesome.  They shape valleys and mountains, and change landscapes.  They are beautiful, but can be dangerous. Many have been around longer than people.  So, I think it would be quite satisfying to be able to say, “Yeah, I’ve walked on a glacier.”  Alaska would be a fantastic place to accomplish this, since there are glaciers there, and because Alaska itself is pretty cool.  It represents an untouched area of the planet (in some spots), and is not likely to remain that way.  Anything that isn’t predicted to be unspoiled forever rates a trip in my book.

Item # 20, 24, 25, 27, 41, 43, 57: Travel to Italy

I had to list so many items because I want to see ALL of Italy.  There are even some places I didn’t list on my bucket list that I want to see.  For example, I would love to go to the Amalfi Coast and Capri, but I didn’t mention that before.  My reasons for wanting to see Italy are twofold.  First, I’m 1/2 Italian, and we know which towns in Italy our family came from.  It would be amazing to see those towns and know my ancestors might have walked in the same places – goosebump-inducing, really.  Second, Italy is one of those places with so much history and culture and culinary experience that I honestly can’t understand how there can be people who don’t get jacked to go there.  Lucky for me, I’m only 6 months away from making at least a small part of this goal a reality, because I am traveling to Florence, Italy and the surrounding region of Tuscany (and maybe a day trip somewhere else – who knows?!).  Sweet!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.