La notte bianca e il capanno di birra

Last night was La notte bianca, The White Night, when most of the shops and museums in Florence stay open until dawn.  I made dinner with Caitlin and Nicola: pasta with a sauce made with curry, fresh zucchini, and shrimp.  After drinking copious amounts of Chianti, we met more friends and hit the streets.  The centro storico was packed.  It was midnight, and the city felt like a carnival.  We pushed through the crowds to various piazze to see the concerts and events happening there.  It wasn't long before playing rugby with half of Tuscany became annoying, so we headed to the Palazzo Vecchio and spent a few hours there exploring.  Many of the rooms that are not regularly open, like the Terazza di Saturno, were open last night, and wandering through the darkened palazzo, with its grotesques, mythological scenes, and complex architecture, was dreamlike.

Today, we walked to San Minato al Monte.  The organist was practicing Bach inside the church, and we sat outside the facade, listening to the music while we soaked in the sun and looked out over Florence.  We meandered to Vivoli for gelato and wandered through the market in Santa Croce.  I am headed now to the Oblate to finish a paper for restoration.  I'd rather be taken out back and beaten.  I have finished two of my three major papers for the semester, and this is the last one.  It's due on Monday, and Tuesday night, I am planning to go at last to Beatles night at Bee Bop.

Otherwise, Rosa's hut has reopened last week.  Rosa is a Dominican woman who sells apertivi from an octagonal metal structure in the northwest corner of Piazza Savonarola.  When I was studying abroad as in Florence an undergraduate, my friends and I often bought beer from Rosa after classes.  Sipping Heineken tall-boys, we would sit in the piazza and watch families and children from the neighborhood talk and play.  Last Thursday, after two major deadlines, Maggie, Gigi, Caitlin, and I decided to get a few drinks at the hut.  I went to buy the first round, and when I saw Rosa, I reintroduced myself and told her how sweet she was to me and my friends five years ago when I was an undergraduate.  She looked at me sideways, but suddenly a flash of recognition spread across her face.  She laughed, told me that she remembered us well, and we chatted briefly.  She popped the tops off of three beers and pushed them across the bar.  When I reaching for my wallet, she stopped me and said that this round was for old times' sake.  I thanked her, and walked back to my friends sitting under the statue of Savonarola.  Like old times, we sat, sipped our Heinekens, and watched the families and their children in the piazza.