Loose Cans

This place, to quote Jim Morrison, has everything. The Chianti is fine, delightful and sharp, the wild boar salsicce positively savage, glie donne are light and lovely sibyls, the sun shines bright on Il Duomo, the hills, lushly crowned with cypresses, roll like a mighty fiume, the fiume itself, the Arno, is charmingly brown, and then, of course, there's the art. As the good Mr Yates put it, "Ah the Uffizi, ah the Bargello! Beware the Stendahl syndrome, my friend -- apparently it's especially a danger in Florence. Sufferers find themselves virtually blind to their surroundings and wander around in a daze unable to process all that beauty. But hey -- sounds like you got the point of the Baptistry!"

Stendhalismo like whoa. Lonely Planet (as Ben put it, the Talmud to Let's Go's Torah, and hag sameach to you; yes, Nick, I went to the sinagoga) explains the syndrome thus: "The French writer Stendhal was so dazzled by the magnificence of the Basilica de Santa Croce that he was barely able to walk for faintness. He's not the only one to have felt overwhelmed by the beauty of Florence--Florentine doctors reputedly treat a good dozen cases of 'Stendhalismo' a year."

I'll believe it. On top of Il Duomo, the Campanile (Giotto) and the astonishing Baptistry, the Loggia della Signoria (Benvenuto Cellinis and Giambolognas out in the open air) and God all knows what else, I have been to Santa Maria Novella twice already, with the Alberti façade and Masaccio's Trinita and Giotto's Crucifixion with the blood eternally spurting from the spear-gash in his chest and dripping grotesquely onto the rocks and Brunelleschi's Crucifixion with the stark-naked light-as-air Christ, his long lifted arms more like wings than lifeless limbs nailed to lumber, he looks birdlike, our Avian Savior ("On dit que s'il vole qu'on l'appelle voleur/Les anges voltigent autour du joli voltigeur"--Apollinaire, "Zone"), and of course Ghirlandaio's massive fresco with the awesome perspective work in the central apse and Fra Lippo Lippi's just to the right of it, all goblins and demons, the man was possessed, and all this, this is just the beginning. I'm glad I blew out of Rome two days early. Toscana is where it's at. This place has everything. Come on. I show you good time.