It’s our first full day in Florence. We were having a delightful stroll through Boboli Gardens, but the darkening skies were threatening rain. They wouldn’t dare, would they? They would! They did! We made a run for the nearest shelter – Pitti Palace. We ducked into a recess surrounding a side door to the palace. The door was open. We went in. Wow!
We had a good plan for today. After seeing Michaelangelo’s statue of David in the Galleria dell’Accademia, we’d take a bus to nearby Fiesole for lunch and to check out the view of Florence from there.
From Fiesole, we planned to make our way to the well-known bridge, the Ponte Vecchio. But at the last minute, we decide to take a detour to visit Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens first.
Pitti Palace
To recap from last time, Pitti Palace was built to be the opulent residence of the wealthy 15th-century Florentine banker, Luca Pitti. When Signor Pitti died, Eleanor de Toledo, Grand Duchess of Tuscany and wife of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, bought the place.
By the way, after Signor Pitti died, Florence was a town without Pitti. Gene Pitney sang a song about it. Big hit in ’61. Who knew? I apologize. I couldn’t help myself.
The Grand Duchess expanded the already-large palace and oversaw the creation of Boboli Gardens to put it in as grand a setting as possible.
&%$#& Autocorrect!
Please allow me to insert a little aside here. Autocorrect is starting to make me crazy. It refuses to leave “Boboli” alone. It thinks I want to say “Bobble.” And “Pitti Palace”? No. Autocorrect prefers “Patti Palace.”
I fix Autocorrect’s errors – which is ironic in itself – but find out later that it has snuck in it’s preferred spellings while I wasn’t looking. Autocorrect seems unusually determined to eliminate those offending words from the text!
So if I miss one of Autocorrect’s corrections, please understand. (No, I’m not turning Autocorrect off. That would be giving in).
The Costume Gallery
Anyway, we had just ducked into a side door of Pitti Palace to get out of the rain. We found ourselves in a room full of people wearing very old clothes. 15th-Century clothes, in fact!
We had stumbled into the palace’s Costume Gallery. They call it a costume gallery, but it’s really a museum showing the history of fashion through the ages. The mannequins here aren’t wearing reproductions. They’re wearing actual clothes worn by people back in the day.
Most of the clothes are items worn by people who’ve occupied Pitti Palace since the 18th century, although there are some older dresses worn by the aforementioned Eleanor de Toledo.
There’s an area exhibiting theatrical costumes and another showing clothes of celebrities. Mannequins wearing 18th and 19th-century dresses requiring cinched-up corsets looked uncomfortable. How did women breathe when they wore those things?
By the time we finished wandering through the Costume Gallery, it had stopped raining, We decided to walk back to our hotel, crossing the Arno on the Ponte Vecchio in the process. That’s the neat thing about Florence – you can get just about anywhere you want to go by walking.
Mamma Gina’s
We were hungry, though, so before we reached the bridge, we stepped into an inviting-looking restaurant called Ristorante Mamma Gina. How could a restaurant called “Ristorante Mamma Gina” not be good?
A dapper fellow met us as we walked in. In my best italiano, I asked him if there were any tables for two available. He replied, “No.”
“No?” There were empty tables right there in front of us. We could see ’em. But before I could remember how to say “di cosa stai parlando?” he let out a big laugh and said yes, he had a table for two for us.
So… a funny guy, eh? After that, it was all fun and games with this guy. He was too funny. And the food was amazing.
After going on and on about how good our lunch was, I’ll spare you the blow-by-blow description this time.
After a lengthy, leisurely meal and a glass or two of vino at Ristorante Mamma Gina, we were done for the day. The Ponte Vecchio would have to wait for a while. Or as they say, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it!”
To be continued…
Note:
Pitti Palace Photo Credit: Stefan Bauer/Wikimedia Commons
