Arezzo or bust

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Florence is a small city that packs a punch.  Everywhere you turn around there's amazing art work or architecture.  You can wonder from one great work to another, without even stepping into a museum or a church...which, I admit, I have yet to do.  My favorite so far is the view from the Piazza Michaelangelo on the other side of the Arno.  A close second is the pair of street singers that perform Robbie Williams and Simon and Garfunkel songs every Friday and Saturday night by the Uffizi.  Nothing beats a cover of "Better Man" by disheleved street performers standing under a hulking copy of Michaelangelo's David.  I've seen them twice now...

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But as much as Florence overflows with amazing art, the one thing it has even more of are tourists...throngs upon throngs of tourists.  I don't think I've ever been anywhere else that can compete with the number of tourists that squeeze into Florence on a daily basis.  And Florence is not that big.  Add into the mix a healthy number of Florentines with a marked ambivalence to tourists, and its nice to occasionally escape outside the city.  So my new Kiwi friend Maryanne and I headed off to Arezzo today, a small city about an hour train ride outside of Florence.

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Our main purpose in going to Arezzo was to see an exhibition by an artist that Maryanne was interested in.  I had never heard of the artist before but Arezzo is a very picturesque city with - and this was a key point - significantly fewer tourists than Florence, so I was game.  As an aside for movie buffs, Arezzo is also famous as the city in which La Vita e Bella (Life is Beautiful) was filmed.  We managed to get ourselves there without too much incident and had a great morning and afternoon walking around, eating, walking around, drinking a cappucino or two, walking around, and then eating some more.  We stopped in at one of the many churches in Arezzo and saw what is supposed to be one of the greatest works of Italian art - Piero della Francesca's The Legend of the True Cross.

After getting our fill of art work and pastries, we finally decided to find the exhibition, which was set to start at 3pm.  Maryanne had carefully written down the address - 147 Via Settembre - so we found the right street on the map and headed to it.  We followed the street to its end, but unfortunately it only went up to number 45.  No 147 in sight.  We paced up and down the street, completely confused.  Finally, read the entire address in full...at which point, it became clear that we were at the right street but just in the wrong city.  Maryanne had read the address "147 Via Settembre, Sanselpolcro, Arezzo" and assumed it was in the town of Arezzo -- not the town of Sanselpolcro in the province of Arezzo, where the exhibition was in fact taking place.  I probably should not have laughed so hard at her confused look when she realized what she'd done, but she's still talking to me, so I think its okay.  Arezzo was a great day trip though, with or without the art exhibition, so all in all it was a good day.