Wine, Women and those Freakin' Bells

Florence is a city of wine, women and…bells, hundreds of bells.

It’s no secret that Italians have wine with almost every meal, but even saying that understates the role that wine has in every day life in Italy. Sometimes they have several different types of wine during the course of a single meal.

One night Sandra and I were invited to have dinner at a country church where her class had done some restoration work. It was a small chapel located on a hillside among rows of olive trees and acres of vineyards.

When we arrived there were three wine bottles, one water bottle and a basket of bread on every table; I still haven’t figured out what the water was for. As the evening moved and our hosts kept bringing the next course of the meal, I never noticed them replacing the wine bottles but, somehow, no matter how much we drank the bottles were always full.

It wasn’t until later that I learned that they not only replenished our bottles, they had switched types of wine to compliment each course; we had six courses! When desert came they brought us a special wine used specifically for dipping cookies into…then they brought the desert wine.

The whole event took about three hours and we had consumed two different kinds of pasta, a salad, ribs, chicken and sausages along with desert and several bottles of wine but somehow I didn’t feel stuffed from overeating or a buzz from the non-stop flow of wine.

You’ve got to believe that through the centuries that the Italians have really figured out the human digestive system and, as far as I’m concerned, civilization. If you can eat that much, consume that much wine and even manage to make cookies soaked in booze an awesome desert; you are one civilized individual.

I am a happily married man and have no interest ever being anything but a happily married man but I am not a blind man or a dead man so I did notice that Florence is overrun with women, particularly young well-dressed articulate American women. Who knew?

When I was a young sailor searching unsuccessfully for young good looking articulate American women, it never occurred to me to look in Florence, Italy. For the record I never did find a good-looking articulate American woman…she found me!

You’re probably wondering why there are so many top shelf American girls gathered in Florence. The answer begins with a program called a “semester abroad” which is offered by upper end private colleges, to let rich kids to spend a semester of their freshman year “studying” abroad (insert your own off color pun here.)

Apparently this is something wealthy people have been doing for a while to get their 18 year-olds out of the house. It’s brilliant, really, if you can afford it you can make your kid want to leave the house!

The reason so many of the young ladies spend their semester abroad in Florence is because there are dozens of universities in Florence that specialize in teaching pretty much anything even remotely related to art.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect that you could get a degree in motel shower curtain design if that’s how you choose to waste your daddy’s money or you have a sincere interest in tasteful bathroom accessories. If you’re an art student, Florence is your place.

I’d be willing to bet an over-valued Euro that over 80% of the Americans studying art in Florence are female, probably about 80% of those would too young to be barely dressed and dancing too close some scumbag German tourist named Gunther instead of studying the finer points of shower curtain design; which is how too many of them spend their time.

That’s just wrong.

Among the features that makes Florence so appealing are it’s abundance of centuries old cathedrals. Each of them is an amazing work of architectural art, each a piece of history and each equipped with fully functional bells.

Bells that ring on the hour, on the half hour, when an event is happening, if there is a rumor an event might happen or, it seemed to me, anytime I was trying to take a nap. It was uncanny and after the first 17 times it happened it became a statistical impossibility that the bells ringing everytime I dozed could be a coincidence.

So when I think back on my time in Florence I’ll always remember the wine, women and the bells, those freakin’ bells!