Fluttering around Florence
Entry posted by Nameless1
961 views
On our last trip to Italy in 1998, we had accumulated a number of sort-of-dollhouse-sized tchotchkes at rest stops along the Autostrade, so I was looking forward to exciting finds on our visit to Florence and Milan. No such luck. These are better cities for visuals than for loot.
Important vocabulary
--Case della bambolini: dollhouses
--Modellisti ferroviari: model railroads
--Giocattoli: toys
Shopping
Though we wandered all of central Florence, plus beyond the city walls into the wilds of San Frediano, we found little in the way of miniatures. The city's big toy store on Via Cavour, Dreoni Giocattoli, carries no dollhouse miniatures, and their model railroading buildings are imported from Germany. On our last afternoon, following lunch on the Piazza della Signoria, we wandered into a toy-ish gift shop on Via Calimaruzza, but the Reutter Porzellan was double the price it had been in Vienna, and the model cars were not my scale.
Florence seems to simply be too tourist-focused to be a good source of miniatures, though every now and again you may stumble over something small in a shop -- and if you want marblized paper or postcards of architectural drawings, it's hog heaven.
The parts of Milan that we visited -- largely the area around the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, as it was Saturday night and Sunday -- were devoid of miniatures, alas.
What gives with Italian miniatures, you ask? We did some research before getting to Florence and discovered that dollhouse shops seem to end up in the smaller cities like Bologna or Cretona. My sense from browsing a few Web sites was that there isn't an indigenous dollhouse industry. Stock seemed to be familliar U.S. brands, the UK's Dolls House Emporium, and Spain's Artesania Latina. I'm shameless about buying Artesania Latina when I come across it, but use caution: some of their items are identical to Town Square.
Visuals in Florence
Florence is another city where just wandering around is entertainment in itself, and of course there are so many historic churches and major museums that you will not run out of things to see. Should you have a model church that you want to decorate, I'd stock up on postcards of frescos and have some fun.
For historic interior design overload, there are two Museum Must-Sees. One is the Palazzo Pitti, where you want to see the Royal Apartments of de Medici family. These go for Baroque in a big way. Should you try to reproduce the look with plaster of Paris and cake-decorating columns, be prepared to clean out the supply of gold leaf at your local craft store. Order your gilding wholesale: it's the de Medici way.
The Palazzo Vecchio captures the de Medici style in an earlier, though hardly more restrained, mood. This is more a fresco experience than a furniture experience, though no Italian museum is complete without a couple of marble inlaid tables. As you stagger to the end of the tour, you can be routed through a little museum of the city of Florence that shows much plainer rooms, also with some furniture.
You will think you want to go to the Museo Davanzati, which purports to show how people really lived, but it has been closed for restoration since 1995. Anyone who has ever fixed up an old house will be panting to know the story behind these delays.
Visuals in Milan
Unlike the typical Italian tourist city, Milan contains a lot of modernist architecture, all of it covered in graffiti. If you take the bus from the airport to a more central area of the city, you will be startled by how every quaint neighborhood square and historic building is covered with spray paint.
The Axis of Eye Candy is defined by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and the Milan Duomo at one end and the Castello Sforzesco at the other. It is vital to the Milan experience that you explore this area twice: once in daylight, when things are open, and once at twilight, for the atmosphere. Fortunately, the area is small, and Milan also has generous public transportation, including both orange streetcars and an efficient subway system.
The Castello includes a collection of antique furniture that, while not huge, is interesting. And it's a castle, which is hard to argue with. While I think I've given the right link, the castle's brochures about its collections are confusing. If you wander pretty much the entire place, you'll see everything you could want to see and a few things you don't, and that kills a Sunday afternoon when nothing else is open anyway. You will want gelato after this exertion, so fortunately there's a lot of it on the piazzas outside the castello. We went to a heavily tourist-visited gelato cafe nearby and did not regret it, so that we got to sit down while consuming our mega-whompus parfaits.
The Galleria is the most beautiful shopping mall in the world, and if you say otherwise, them's fightin' words. It is surrounded by buildings in various stages of oldness, so you should definitely wander generously. The Galleria itself runs to Italian designer clothing at full price (not my style of shopping), but if you walk all the way to the back (the side nearer La Scala), there is a restaurant called Il Salotto that serves extraordinarily exciting Lombardy cooking at a price that, while not super-cheap, is lower than what's charged by the restaurants nearer the front end, the ones catching the tourists who couldn't stagger another step without sustenance. Our first meal there was fabulous, and our second was the best we had in Italy and rivaled the drop-dead marvelous meal from Paris a couple years ago.
Emerge from the Galleria, well-fed, at sunset so you can stroll around the piazza, then follow the street that runs from the Galleria to the Castello. Walk slowly. You won't regret it.
1 Comment
Recommended Comments