Prato Before the Crowds Come

On Sunday we lucked into a unique and privileged experience that will probably be harder to reproduce as time goes on, the highlight of which was a half hour sitting in the choir of Duomo di Prato studying the Filippo Lippi frescoes there.

Prato is a small city about 30 minutes drive from Florence but feeling overlooked by their Chamber of Commerce. I know I had never heard of it, and it's not in the "side trips from Florence" suggested by our guidebooks or one of the numerous stops in the Tuscany section. The Chamber wants in on the action and has organized a series of free bus trips with guides from Florence, and we were lucky enough to notice the ad in an English-language paper. We were really the only "tourists" -- all the other English speakers were people living here temporarily and more plugged in than us.

This happened to be the first week of the experiment. Each week has a theme, and this one was food and art. Perfecto!

We started not in Prato, actually, but in a small village outside called Paggio a Caiano where one of many Medici villas in the region is located. This one has a unique role in the history of architecture (the first one without the fortress design and an interior courtyard) and it still houses an interesting art collection, much of which focuses on food, plants and still lifes. Someone in the Medici clan along the way was obsessed with documenting everything exotic collected by naturalists around the world and all the hybrids in the garden, and he commissioned painters to catalog it all on canvas.

These figs for example, are labelled with little numbers and the scroll is the key.

For lunch, we were set loose in the sleepy little village without any tourist attention, and we got the real deal at a trattoria serving the local Sunday afternoon crowd -- one of the best meals I've had yet.

Then it was in to Prato for a couple of sites. One chapel in the Duomo has some interesting frescoes by Agnolo Gaddi documenting a nutty legend about a belt Mary supposedly gifted to St. Thomas and that eventually showed up as the dowry for a poor girl marrying a Prato merchant traveling in Jerusalem. A lot of traditions have grown up around the sacred relic, and now it's kept in a locked box disguised as an alter, which requires three keys to open, one each held by the bishop, the mayor and governor. That's so the people of Pisa won't steal the belt. Five times a year the town gathers on the piazza for the displaying of the belt from the unusual exterior pulpit.

The highlight, though, is the crowded choir space behind the main pulpit where Lippi painted The Stories of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist, including the dancing Salome figure that is so often reproduced but rarely seen. I think it's equal to and as important as anything in the Uffizi gallery -- Botticelli's Venus, for example -- and I can't believe the luck we had getting to take some quiet time with it.

If the Chamber of Commerce and the enthusiastic young people running this tour have their way, we won't be the last to see it, but we'll be among the last to do so in such a charming a way. Inside the church, a worshiper scolded our tour guide for talking aloud to our group, but they're used to that in Rome and Florence, and they might have to get used to that in Prato.

Waiting for our ride back, we sat at a cafe on the piazza watching locals take their Sunday stroll. There was room enough for people to circle their bikes around, to let their dogs run loose, to recognize and flag one another down, and for kids to kick soccer balls. There wasn't a postcard rack or selfie-stick seller in sight.

Transitioning to Florence

We wound up Rome with several more whirlwhind days trying to pack in all the museums we hadn't been to yet. (I'm working in a series of photos showing galleries empty except for overlooked art and antiquities.)

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 . . .