Florence

Saw the Uffizi gallery yesterday.  All of the guidebooks say to reserve a ticket in advance.  It is very easy to do so.  The hotel did it in ten seconds, an hour before we wanted to go there.  There is an English speaking phone hotline for people who want to do it themselves.  There are signs at the actual museum telling people how to reserve, and I suppose they could even do it on their cell phones once they arrive and see that the line of people without reservations goes around the building and takes hours, while the reservation line takes about 10 minutes.  They control the number of people who get to enter the museum at any given time, for crowd control.  Despite their efforts, it's still very crowded and many of the rooms basically involve following a single line of people looking at things quickly while being shoved by the person behind you.  Lots of sculptures.  I wish some of them had been wearing more clothes.  I took some stupid notes about a few artists and paintings, but I'll share them once I'm home and write a longer post.  The pizza in New York has so far beaten the pizza in Italy, silly as that sounds.  Not so much the normal NY pizza, but the upscale pizza places like Franny's in Park Slope, really, it's just as good there as here.  That's not a slight on Italy -- it's good -- but a credit to New York, I think.  Similarly, I'd put Il Laboratorio del Gelato up against San Crispino in Rome, which is supposed to have the best in the city, according to the New York Times and all of the guidebooks.  I had the licorice flavor, which the woman warned me was intensely flavored.  It was, but that was what I was hoping for.  It was good.  Florence is a very small, very walkable city.  Cars and pedestrians share a lot more of the street in Italy than in the U.S.  Like sidewalks and stuff like that.  Saw a car plow into a street sign yesterday, back up, and keep on motoring on without a second thought.

Back on Sunday.  More then.