We went to Fiesole yesterday, where, among other things, we had an excellent lunch. The restaurant (part of slightly crumbling hotel) was kind of dowdy, but it has a terrace with a fabulous view toward Florence. And the meal – with great old-fashioned service including an ice bucket for our bottle of Pinot Grigio and fish knives for our sea bass – was so good. Fiesole is spectacularly situated, and we took advantage of the setting by walking the “panoramic passage,” the entire loop which might have been two miles at least, with the first half almost entirely uphill until we reached some kind of pinnacle from which all could be viewed.
On the bus trip up to the town itself we passed a sign, small, for a footpath, wide, which ran below the road: the Via Arnold Böcklin, which reminded me that of course he’d been here. All those Tuscan cedars, those tall columnar ones…
After lunch, which we took after our “panorama walk,” we visited the archaeological site featuring Roman and Etruscan ruins. We didn’t visit the museum, though. Somehow neither one of us could face a museum, not after all the spectacular nature.
During meditation this morning, a marching band played (badly) in front of S. Maria Novella. And I slept badly during the night because of all the drunks screaming and yodeling their way across the piazza all night long, which I could hear, even though the windows were closed. So my scribblings are more than typically disjointed. Taking the train today to visit B. in her village.
