The branch of the Capitoline Museum in the south of the city, Centrale Montmarti, was especially cool. It's set in a decommissioned power plant with much of the heavy equipment still on post among the sculpture and mosaics illustrating an interesting point in the art of ancient Rome when suburban villas were becoming all the rage.
On that day made a stop at Eately, which is an interesting visual feast.
And I don't remember how many other old family palazzos converted into art galleries we crammed in. I try to be good about noting them all in my journal every night. Good thing, too. The other day I flipped back a few pages to our trip to Paris about five years ago and read about a very charming evening out that neither one of us had any memory of.
We made last stops at a couple restaurants that had become favorites, packed up and on Friday started the trip to Florence. It was May Day and when we finally did get a cab to the train station, it was the most fun ride we had the whole time zipping through nearly empty streets. The high-speed train was a pleasure and makes me annoyed all over again at the lousy train system we have to deal with in the U.S.
We've once again had internet troubles at this apartment, and dealing with that and other errands to get established and has sucked up a lot of time in the first few days. But apart from that, we're loving it here. It's very friendly and easy going compared to Rome, and there seems to be a lot more care with design and presentation in the shops. I love just looking at the signs at the high-end stores. We're also eating a lot better here. Our apartment is a couple of cells in a medieval building and comes with a lot of space, design, electrical and plumbing challenges. Also it's impervious to cell phone signals.
So far we've only hit one museum, the Bargello, home of the best regarded collection of renaissance sculpture and a lot of interesting material on the transition from medieval to renaissance. We have our "skip the line" tickets for the Uffizi gallery tomorrow, the likely highlight of the trip for me.
We've had one other side trip that I'll tell about later, and there's something else interesting going on town right now that I'll tell about later, but here's a hint . . .
