8/8/15
Florence, Italy

Holy Duomo, what an awful night. I would have preferred to sleep in a den with howling wolves or a thousand cats in heat than spend one more night like this last one.

Our 8:30 a.m. appointment was the best decision we could have made. We skipped the entire line and stepped inside the 436-year-old museum. First we entered the Botticelli rooms. Botticelli was a famous Florentine widely considered one of the best Renaissance painters. He was most famous for his two pieces: Primavera and The Birth of Venus, both of which were hanging in the Uffizi. It wasn’t hard to spot The Birth of Venus. The roughly six-by-nine-foot painting dominated the attention of everyone in the room—all four of us. Botticelli was amazing, but we were here to see David’s cajones, so we left to find him.

We found a curator sitting silently along a wall, waiting patiently for a random observer to ask him a question about one of the eight paintings in the room. We asked him where we could find David, and he replied the five worst words since “Hey, look! There’s a Zara.”

“David? In a different museum.”

“I’m sorry,” I replied. “You mean a different wing of the museum?”

“Nope, David is at the Galleria dell’Accademia,” he replied, almost excited that he was about to witness one of us get extremely mad at the other.

I turned slowly to Ash, whose face was red with embarrassment. “Oh yeah, that’s right. It is in a different museum,” she said, half smiling, clearly with her proverbial tail between her legs.

I should have done more research, but she’d lived here once. We marched home, dejected, then grabbed slices of pizza and napped. I was too tired to care.

By evening, La Cantinetta was calling our name. It was our last night in Florence, so we returned to the land of taste bud explosions. We had planned on getting the exact same meal as before, but I sent my brother, Carter, a picture of the appetizers to get his advice. He knew much more about food than we did. He chose a platter of local Tuscan meats and said, “Those meats will knock your socks off.” My socks were stuck to my feet from the sweat, so these meats would have to be pretty amazing.

After we ordered, I watched as the butcher pulled gargantuan cured meats from hangers and shaved off pieces onto our plates. I noticed a sliver of a piece that was rather small, and the chef threw it away, as it was not to his standard. Cutting corners was not an option for an Italian chef. This was not work; this was his passion, his craft. Against all odds, consider me sockless.