Florence, the city I remember as an eighteen year old, still charms. The Piazza Signoria, where I sat with friends, surrounded by statues sharing pizza and wine and contemplating our future, brings all those memories back to me. The books I've read since - "The Birth of Venus" and "Galileo's Daughter" - imbue the city with the mystery and intrigue of the Medicis. This time I linger more. I go back for one more look at that Botticelli or Michelangelo, because they are beautiful, but also because it may be the last time. In his fifties, MIchelangelo contemplated death and dying when he sculpted the tombs of his friends in the Medici Chapel, though he lived on to be 89. In most museums, photos are not allowed, so in the Uffizi, my favorites were Lippi's Madonna and Child with Angels, because of the angel boy's faces, of course the Botticelli's -"Spring" and the "Birth of Venus", and Michelangelo's round painting, "The Holy Family". Next we hit the Medici Chapels to see Michelangelo's "Night and Day" and "Dawn and Dusk" adorning the tops of the sarcophagi of his friends who had died so young. After dinner at Leoni 4, with their fiiocchetti di petra in salsa de taleggio and asparagi - little pasta packages stuffed with pears in a cheese and asparagus sauce - we took in the Palazzo Vecchio, with it's lavishly decorated Medici living quarters and the studiola - man cave - of Francesco I.
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