Jazz and Easter

Yesterday I went to the museum of the Duomo and the Santa Croce Church. Very interesting. I tagged onto T's classmates' tour and their tour guide was phenomenal. Italian history/ art history is like the ultimate drama-- like the time the Medici family pretty much wiped out this other family (drawing a blank here 'cause im typing really fast)by secretly hanging them, or how...someone's body was stolen from under a church. Wow, I really need to brush up. I know I sound like a failure right now but really, I'm just failing to explain these things.This one guy's finger is still in the Santa Croce church, P.S.! The catholics like to keep body parts, it seems. But it makes sense...the body is the case of the great leaders/priests/saints. It's the only physical part of them we can keep around after they've passed. They're off, but we can certainly keep their pinky finger in a glass container in a beautiful church that has loads of dead bodies underneath it (which is a little bit sarcastic in order to make you smile, not because I don't think the finger of a saint is not a good thing to case up. I do, in fact, I think. Do you? First time anyone's asked you this question?).

The highlight of the day: I saw Dante's tomb!! Pictures to come...and I'll just narrate them, so i don't bumble around with words as I am now, trying to balance them on my tongue to volley over to you in a grouping that explains intelligently what I saw yesterday...

Let's try again, shall we? Last NIGHT we went to the Jazz Club. You have to become a member in order to get in (8 euro) but then I think you're a member for life, or until you lose your membership card. We get in there, right, having had a bottle of wine between the three of us (T, her roommate M, and myself) on the way, as we always seem to have when one the streets (no open container law, remember), T in her new very cool strappy black heels and gray fedora. We were all ready to be jazzed out. There are other clubs in Florence, but mostly, they aren't such a good time. Lots of grabbing and as I've been told, pretty shitty music. But the Jazz Club! It's different. We were stoked on it and we stayed there all night listening to A. Franklin covers and others. It was more soul than jazz, and the Italian band, Dr. Funky and Mr. Soul, had all three of us wishing there were more room to dance. But you gotta keep it cool in joints like that at first, though, you know, I think. Tuesdays and Thursdays Jazz Club hosts jam seshs. Wish I'd frequented that place sooner since I'm headed to Berlin tomorrow. Definitely chillest bar/club in Florence. Good people, good vibes; it's an awesome place to hang with friends or flirt with a photographer from across the room who may or may not be in love with the singer.

Italian Easter is crazy-- full of fireworks, a mechanical bird, crowds ( which = a couple creepy gropers). The fireworks were so loud, so explosive, and sounded so much like multiple machine guns firing into the crowd, there were a couple moments I thought we might be done for, that maybe the government was just sick of us all. This was a grim and terrible thought, but thoughts like this are natural reactions to loud explosions and bright lights of the sort that were firing for the Easter celebration today around the Duomo that had the whole town in an impossible-to-navigate crowd gathered around this gigantic dresser-like box from which a mechanical bird comes out and then back in. The Florentines used to release a bird on Easter and if it came back or found its way out (it used to be held in a stadium), the harvest would be good. Now, they just use this mechanical one. Why take a chance when technology is on your side, right?

When I wasn't paralyzed by the sound, unlike any firework sound I've heard in my whole life, I was crying from laughing, or very happy from watching the very cute Italian kids perched on their caretaker's shoulders. They seemed to me like a community of shoulder people, as there were many of them and they would turn and communicate with each other, with screams or looks of disgust, quite effectively. Little kids have a system, I think, and I was very happy to be amongst them. They'd call out the cutest things, too, like when one of the best ones, bespectacled, of course, shouted out "Fabuloso!!" At times like these I was so moved, I touched my heart, shouted "Happy Easter!" in Italian, thought of my family back home, and then immediately returned my hand to my side to continue deflecting the poorly concealed advances of Old Man Thigh Grabber. There's one or two of them in every crowd, and they're old (in my case, also Italian), so you can't just, you know, shake them or something.

Happy Easter!!!!

Much love sent from Florence! xoxo