Miami (Layover): 6 hours. Too early and too far to get Cuban food. Walk the airport end-to-end, scrounge
Brussels (Layover): 7 hours. Somehow still too early to get food. Train into central, meet latenight (early) partyers returning home, exchange pleasant expletives
Rome: a train
Florence (S. M. Novella): and finally B’s mom’s car, which could fit my bags
We drove up into Le Cure and parked in the church’s private lot. She had a clicker, and the reason she had a clicker for the church’s parking was a long story and I didn’t understand anyway. Suffice it to say parking’s hard in Florence and you do whatever it takes.
So it wasn’t until late when I’d gotten settled into her place. I hadn’t slept in a day and half, but I was psyched to get out and see the city I love. And I was hungry…
Florence can be tricky at night. Some say it’s lame after hours. I never thought so, though I’m most content just walking it from end to end. I’ve walked it at every hour, day and night and I’ve never felt unsafe, rather, enthralled by the history dripping from every stone in the street, every edifice and alley surrounding, never tiring of it. But getting food in the middle of the night can be tough if you don’t know where to go. And up in Le Cure, a quiet residential neighborhood on the Northern edge of the city, more so. Except B has a motorino!
So I hung on for my life as the wind whipped my proverbial hair (I was of course wearing a helmet) and she took shortcuts the wrong way down one-way streets, did the chicane up and over the tracks, the broad sweep around Piazza Libertà, shooting out into one of the streets I still don’t understand which converge towards S. M. Novella station as if on a whim, finally swinging away and toward the Mercato Centrale.
Mercato Centrale late night, you say?
Yes, friends, it’s true. In the three years I’d been gone, the upper floor of the 19th century stone, steel and glass market has been transformed into a hip food court, open til midnight, every night. And while I felt a twinge of regret that this place, the old market I loved downstairs (which remains), had somehow slipped into a hip— hipster modern eatery, akin to the LA Central Market, the problem is, like it’s Angelino cousin, it’s pretty fantastic (and this is the hipster dilemma more generally: they really do make great coffee, and beer and food). You got your Tuscan cucina povera with porchetta, and tripe, and bean soup; your fish; your pasta… but because I’m a cliché, and all the more when it’s late and I’m hungry, pizza.
Damn good pizza.
Sud, the pizza joint, an editor’s pick of Florence’s English-language paper, The Florentine, does wood-fired, vaguely Neopolitan pies in Margherita, White, Trecolore, all the favorites, damn well. It’s a couple Euros more than you might pay for other good pizza at less trendy spots in town, but far less than you’d get for similar in the States.
So, pizza in hand, I walked around the other side of the packed atrium’s support columns to the bar for a draft. The bartender was a sirly Florentine and wasn’t really interested in discussing micro-brew options (they had none as it turned out). Florentines can be jerks, they admit it, if a little too pridefully. Try to embrace it, get on that wavelength, and give as good as you get, and know that in a way it’s not personal, it’s simply attitude. So roll with it. Shrug at ‘em. Speak with your hands. You might wind up friends.
But back to the beer. They were serving these Birra Moretti lines with names evoking different regions of Italy, claiming to be made of the traditional produce of each. Birra Moretti is something akin to Italian Budweiser, in relative scale and taste, and it seemed like a play for Italians’ strong sense of identity and place in the face of an emerging craft brewing scene.
So Mercato Centrale doesn’t have the most interesting beer. So what it. And it’s a bit hip. It’s open late and the food is good (for Italy). And I’d find, over the next months in Florence and up and down the boot, that in my absence breweries had sprung up like toadstools. Thank you hipsters.
Full and charmed as always by the city, we returned to B’s shoebox attic, at long last to sleep hard, on a soft bed, under a slanting ceiling a foot from my nose.
