• Wednesday, March 5 (PHL —> Frankfurt)
• Thursday, March 6 (Milano)
• Friday, March 7 (Milano)
• Saturday, March 8 (Milano)
• Sunday, March 9 (Milano —> Firenze)
• Monday, March 10 (Firenze)
• Tuesday, March 11 (Firenze)
• Wednesday, March 12 (Firenze —> Venezia)
• Thursday, March 13 (Venezia)
• Friday, March 14 (Venezia)
• Saturday, March 15 (Venezia)
• Sunday, March 16 (Venice –> Trieste)
• Monday, March 17 (Trieste)
• Tuesday, March 18 (Trieste)
• Wednesday, March 19 (Trieste —> Milano)
• Thursday, March 20 (Milano —> Philadelphia)

Wednesday, March 5 (PHL —> Frankfurt)

• 1530 Gary, the ride-service, car-detailing entrepreneur, picks us up and drives us to the airport.
• 1550 Arrive airport. Check our bags ($75 each) and have TSA Precheck added to our boarding passes.
• 1600 Go through security. An surprisingly short line. We endup wandering the terminal far earlier than we had expected. Stroll up and down the corridors of terminal A.
• 1700 L says she’s hungry, so we stop at La Colombe and get a yogurt (for me), pumpkin muffin and “protein box” (grapes, cheese, boiled egg, trail mix) to share.
• 1735 Boarding is delayed, so we continue walking.
• 1810 Finally board, fifteen minutes after the planned departure time. We sit at the gate for a long time, then once we pull out, it’s another long stretch before we take off.
• 1913 Finally depart PHL, nearly 1h20m after our scheduled departure time. We’ll surely miss our 0856 connecting flight in Frankfurt. The lights are low, and we try to sleep.
• 2000 Lights go up, and to our surprise, dinner is served. L has tortellini with vegetables—which seemed a safer choice than the beef entree I got, but the pasta is overheated and dry, and my beef is served in a spicy red sauce, accompanied by potatoes gratin and peas with carrots. Yes, it was good but not that good. After dinner, we’re finally able to doze, lightly, for a couple of hours

Thursday, March 6 (Milano)

• 0700 (ECT) Lights go up, and breakfast is served. Mushroom brioche and “chocolate sponge.”
• 0845 Land in Frankfurt, Germany. Our missed flight was rebooked while we were in the air, which simplifies our layover. Our bus takes a long, serpentine route from the airplane to Concourse B. The troll at the entrance to Terminal B will not allow us entry with the boarding passes for our original flight (which has already departed), and I fuss with L’s phone to get her new boarding pass to display so we can proceed to our gate.
• 0930 Caffé macchiato at our gate. L has a caffé crema and doesn’t like it. We read newspapers provided on a stand in the waiting area (International NYTimes and the Financial Times). The waiting area is warm in the bright morning sunshine, and we look out large windows onto the main Frankfurt Airport building.
• 1050 Our flight begins boarding. We’re near the back of the line.
• 1100 With only about ten passengers remaining to board, we reach the entrance to the gate. When L scans her boarding pass, red lights flash and an angry sound is emitted by the scanner. We are told to step over to the counter. My boarding pass is OK, but something is wrong with L’s. Two calm, diligent staff members (a 50ish German woman and a 35ish dark-haired woman of non-Western) work for fifteen minutes sorting it out. Small successes are followed by defeats until the young woman declares victory. We never learn what the problem had been. With fifteen minutes until departure, we approach the disapproving scanner, and when L scans her new boarding pass, it once again rejects her. The older woman says, “Go ahead, go ahead. It’s something with the baggage. We’ll work it out.” We go downstairs and get into a bus, and after a short wait the bus travels what must be 2 km to our plane, taking a winding route among planes and baggage handlers and under buildings.
• 1130 Frankfurt to Milan. See the Alps out the window.
• 1240 Arrive Milan. Take M4 Metro to San Ambrogio stop. It’s a beautiful day, warm and sunny.
• 1330 Walk fifteen minutes from the metro stop to the Hotel Antica Locanda Leonardo, whose entrance is an understated white wooden door with a name plate. We ring the doorbell, and several seconds later the door unlocks. A young woman who speaks good English takes us to our room.
• 1430–1630 Nap
• 1700 Phone alarm goes off. We check our phones. I am squirrelly and eager to get out.
• 1845 Leave and walk to Bebel, where we have a reservation for 1900. We arrive at 1852 and spend a few minutes looking at the window displays of a well-stocked bookstore next door, which includes Italian translations of books by George Saunders and Barbara Kingsolver.
• 1900 A lovely, if long and at moments disappointing, dinner at Bebel. We follow another American couple into the restaurant as we open the place (a tradition for Americans in Italy). There are several staff floating on the floor, and one of them, a grey-haired man in his early fifties, comes over to chat. He asks where we’re from, and we mention Philadelphia. “Oh, I’ve been there.” His English is pretty good. He spent a year in the US seven years ago, working at a restaurant in Miami. During that year, he visited Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities. A phone call takes him away, and when he returns, he asks, under his breath, “What do you think of your President Trump? He seems like a madman.” We quickly concur and commiserate. As we talk, our waiter, a puckish man of about fifty, stops by our table to take our order, but we aren’t ready. “Un momento,” I say. Lisa seems settled on “scallopinni con limone,” which we both think is scallops. Our US-savvy friend swoops in and suggests that if we want traditional Milanese dishes, we should have the osso buco con risotto and a veal cutlet and share the carciofi al grana as an appetizer. I quickly agree to the osso buco, but L doesn’t want veal and sticks to the scallopini. The artichoke dish arrives, and it’s unusual but wonderful: thinly slicked artichoke heart, pickled, with shaved parmigiano reggiano. Then the main courses arrive. First, my osso buco, then the scallopini. When the plate is placed before L, our faces fall. It is veal scallopini, thinly sliced meat in a lemony white sauce, with simply prepared brown arboro rice on the side. She’s disappointed, and I apologize for not confirming that the dish would be scallops (which would have been capesante). Once she starts eating the veal, she likes it and is grateful it is simple and bland. My osso buco is good, though the meat is a bit tough. The risotto milanese is fine, maybe a bit salty.
• The puckish waiter comes back with a dessert menu, and L wants the advice of our US-travelling friend, who is keen on our getting the tiramisu, and we take his suggestion, although neither of us is particularly excited about it. (“We can get good tiramisu at home,” L says to me.) At that moment, the waiter arrives with a plate of fried fragments of pie pastry dusted with powdered sugar. Had we known it was coming, we probably wouldn’t have ordered dessert. Soon the tiramisu arrives—scooped spoonfuls on a plate, dusted with cinnamon. It’s lighter than what we get in the US, and I like it. L prefers the fried pastry. When I ask, “Questa dolce, come si chiama?” the two waiters enjoy explaining that they’re chiacchiere, which means “chit chat.”
• 2030 The restaurant starts filling up with Italians, many of whom greet the staff by name. We sit at the table for at least ten minutes, waiting for the check, but that’s fine, because we’re entertained by the arrival of these new customers. A middle-aged couple arrives with two dogs, one of which is a dachshund that resembles our dog.
• 2102 Ristorante Pizzeria Bebel, Via San Vittore 3 (€86.00: carciofi grana, osso riso, scaloppina limone, tiramisu)

Friday, March 7 (Milano)

• 0800 Breakfast at the hotel: yogurt, bacon, eggs, brie, purple bread, lemon tart
• 1000 Walk to tourist center to pick up a not-so-great map
• 1040 Santa Maria della Grazie, where “The Last Supper” is located. We walk around the interior of the church.
• 1100 Check in for the Cenacolo tour; go back to the Maria della Grazie gift shop. L buys a postcard.
• 1120 Go through the entrance for the Cenacolo tour, and we are given earphones. We are near the end of the line, and as we continue into the antechamber, we hear the tour guide through our earphones. We follow the end of the group toward glass doors leading into a vestibule where the tour guide is droning on into a microphone. The glass doors begin shutting as L walks through them, and instead of stepping back, she tries unsuccessfully to hold them open and receives a stern lecture from the tour guide as the two dozen tourists turn to look at L.
• 1130 Spend fifteen minutes in the spacious dining hall with the Last Supper (fifteen minutes is all that is allowed). As the guide continues talking, the tourists are clustered around her in front of the painting. I absent-mindedly take a forbidden video and am chastised for it. L walks away and sits on a bench at the back. When the group moves to the other end of the hall to view a crucifixion painting, L gets up and walks to the Last Supper and looks at it for the few minutes that remain. The guide continues her lecture outside the space, and we leave the group to check out the gift shop and then leave.
• 1300 Go to the grocery around the corner from our hotel. Get a slice of pizza, yogurt, bottle of water. It’s surprisingly inexpensive. Go back to our room and eat our lunch.
• 1304 Ares Market Milano (€7.14: lunch: slice of pizza, lemon yogurt)
• 1350 Walk to Duomo di Milano. The piazza in front is packed with tourists. It takes us a while to find the “arancia” (orange) entrance.
• 1430 Climb stairs to the roof of the Duomo. Walk along the north side then up to the crest of the roof, then across the south side. Take many photos.
• 1515 Enter the church, the third largest in Italy. There are two organs.
• 1600 Visit the archaeological area downstairs, containing excavated ruins of a Roman temple.
• 1719 After leaving the Duomo, walk quickly through Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Stop for gelato on the way back to the hotel. Venchi, Via Mengoni 1 (€8.50; two cones of gelato)
• On the walk back from the gelato shop, we pass a Biletti coffee pot shop, and I take a photo to send to my younger son, who is a moka pot enthusiast. On a quiet side street, we pass a home goods store with offbeat inventory in the window. L sees some spiral-shaped candles like the ones she admired in the hallway of our hotel. We go in and look at the selection, but they don’t have a color combination that L likes, and she’s concerned about getting them home intact.
• 1815 Rest at the hotel
• 1910 Walk to Nerino Dieci, a wonderful restaurant. We enter, and a staff member asks, in Italian, whether we have a reservation. I say a simple “si” in response, and he immediately switches to English, much to my chagrin. We are seated in a cosy back room. Our waiter resembles a forty-year-old Marlon Brando. We share a calamari–lentil appetizer that is amazingly good. L has a mushroom–black truffle risotto, and I have a scallop–broccoli white sauce on a square long pasta. We finish with Crema Leonardo (white pudding with crunch grape-nuts-like topping, with fruit) and two decaf espressos.
• At the restaurant, we are seated near a pair of Asian women in their early thirties who diligently but dispassionately photograph each dish as it’s put down before them and video the preparation of their shared pasta dish in a hollowed-out wheel of Parmigiano Reggiano—a trendy practice in the US that I’m surprised to see in Italy. (I suspect it’s appealing to the tourist trade.)
• 2103 Nerinodieci, Via Nerino 10 (€98.00; dinner: tonnarelli capesante, risotto finf castagn, calamretti, calice bianco, leonardo dessert). Walk back to hotel
• Although this is a large city, many of the narrow streets we walk along in the evening are practically deserted, yet we never feel in danger. We never encounter loiterers or people we might consider a threat.

Saturday, March 8 (Milano)

• L is sick overnight. She spends nearly an hour in the bathroom. She thinks it was something she ate—probably at Nerino Dieci.
• 0700 Alarm goes off. I sleep for twenty more minutes.
• 0740 Go alone to the breakfast room. The fellow in charge has good taste in music: Johnny Hartman with John Coltrane today, and it was Bill Evans yesterday. Eat cured meats and brie on purple bread, a blood orange.
• 0915 Head out alone to Pinacoteca di Brera. Pass the Castello Sforzesco on the way and take photos.
• 1000 Pinacoteca di Brera. Enter through a beautiful courtyard. Start in the library, then move fairly quickly from room to room. I’m restless, and I’m not very engaged by the art, especially without L along. Decide to leave the museum and go to the Museo del Teatrale La Scala instead
• 1115 Arrive Teatro alla Scala. While standing in front of a poster, a woman walks up to me and asks a question in Italian—presumably having to do with directions. I don’t understand her, and when I look blank and say, “Non parlo italiano,” she turns on her heels, walks back to her husband, and they leave.
• 1120 Museo della Teatrale la Scala. Lots of posters, sculptures of musicians. Wait in line briefly to stand in one of the boxes and take several photos and a video.
• 1210 Walk to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. Go to Feltrinelli bookstore—huge, underground. (I feel rushed because I want to get back to check on L.) After browsing for twenty minutes, I select a collection of Chekhov stories in Italian translation and buy it.
• La Feltrinelli (€16.50; Racconti / Anton Čechov; ed. Eridano Bazzarelli)
• 1245 Walk back to the hotel. On the way, I pick up a small pot of roses for L, which seems a kind act, but it’s not too practical, since we’re leaving for Florence tomorrow.
• 1244 Au nom de la rose (€16.00)
• 1310 Back in the room. L has stayed in bed all morning, recovering.
• 1315 I make a trip to the corner grocery. Get a salami sandwich, yogurt, rice cakes, and a ginger beer, and take them back to the room. I eat the sandwich and yogurt, and L has a yogurt and some rice cakes. We share the ginger beer.
• 1530 Walk to Castello Sforzesco with L. Lots of people are milling around the central courtyard. In a subtly marked corner, we find the entrance to the Old Spanish hospital that houses Michelangelo’s last, unfinished Piéta, which Lisa wanted to see perhaps more than anything in Milan. As we enter, we hear a guide describing the sculpture, in Italian, to three people. I pick up only a few words of what she’s saying. We walk around the sculpture a couple of times, then look in the small rooms off to the side of the main hall, each holding a pedestal that had been used at various points in the past to display the sculpture. After reading the exhibit captions running along a banister at the back of the room, we sit on one of the benches facing the sculpture. The tour guide has finished with the three Italians and approaches someone on a bench near us, explaining out how Mary’s face was originally pointing to her left before Michelangelo reconceived the layout of the sculpture and carved a new face pointing downward. She leads the new couple to the statue, and we follow. We now realize she is a docent, not a tour guide, and when L expresses interest in what she is saying, she turns her attention to us, and, using a combination of her broken English and my limited comprehension of spoken Italian, she gives us an informed and impassioned description of the artistic choices that Michelangelo made as he reworked the Piéta. We stay another ten minutes before walking back to the hotel. The time with the Michelangelo was one of the highlights of our visit to Milan.
• As we approach a public park, we see a tall woman removing seven dogs from her car to take them to a dog park. One dog begins growling and tussling with another, and she jerks the dog’s leach, then kicks it. “I would not have that woman walking my dog,” says L.
• 1710 Before returning to the hotel, we stop by the now-familiar corner grocery to pick up food for dinner: one-half a rotisserie chicken, little roasted potatoes, and a Leffe beer. (I notice that a six-pack of Peroni is only €3.29, and I’m tempted to buy it, but I’d have to haul the rest to Firenze.)
• 1720 Ares Market, Via Bandello 2 (€9.12; patate al forno, Leffe beer, half a roasted chicken)
• Back in the room, I search for something to remove the bottle cap from the beer bottle, and just as I’m about to walk down to the hotel office to see whether they have one, L remembers there’s a bottle opener built into the strap of her backpack.
• 1730 We feast on our roasted chicken and potatoes then rest a bit before getting dressed for the opera.
• Throughout the trip, I spend some of our down time watching the Italian Food Network on television. I particularly enjoy Luca Pappagallo and Le ricette del convento.
• 1845 Dress for the opera
• 1905 Leave for La Scala. I follow Google Maps to take the shortest route, and it leads us down one or two dark, narrow alleys that nonetheless are named streets on the map. L walks ahead of me, and I tell her which direction to go. Once again, we don’t feel particularly at risk, though there is little light and at times there’s no one within two hundred meters of us.
• 1930 Arrive Teatro alla Scala for Eugene Onegin. The ushers are dressed in garb that makes them look like priests, with black, long-sleeved jackets up to the neck and round pewter medallions on chain necklaces resting on their chests. Our usher tells us to take the stairs up to level four, where a second usher points to our box, which happened to be right in front of us.
• Each box is about twelve feel wide and twelve feet tall and is enclosed on all sides except the front. There are six seats, arranged in pairs: two in front, next to the rail, two in the middle, about three feet back from the rail, at barstool height, and two behind these, at the back of the box, where there is little or no view of the stage. (Our seats are “Palchi Zona 2 PALCO IV ORDINE SX n. 14 Posto 3 e 4,” marked with a pink circle on this floorplan.)
• When we enter our box, there is a couple seated in the chairs near the rail. They are silent and don’t acknowledge us. As we situate ourselves in the two high chairs behind them, I try to comprehend this unusual seating arrangement. Lisa starts in the left chair, and when I realize she’ll need to lean forward to see the stage from around the wall of the box, I suggest we switch seats. There is a teleprompter display below the rail in front of each of the people in front of us, and I feel sure they’ll be set to Italian, but just as the opera is about to begin, the woman sets the screens to English. We hear the two of them exchange a few words, and they seem to be speaking an East European language. English must be the language they know best of the five offered. (Presumably if they were Russian speakers, they wouldn’t need the subtitles.) I notice an analog clock over the proscenium in an odd format: hour in roman numerals on the bottom, with the minutes in Arabic numerals on top—for example, “50 / VII” for 7:50. The clock remained visible throughout the performance and is updated at five-minute intervals. (I later found this photo of the workings of the clock on the internet…)
• The singers are all excellent, but the tenor singing Lensky is particularly good. (Cast: Alisa Kolosova (Larina), Aida Garifullina (Tatyana), Elmina Hasan (Olga), Julia Gertseva (Filippyevna), Alexey Markov (Onegin), Dmitry Korchak (Lensky), Dmitry Ulyanov (Prince Gremin), Oleg Budaratskiy (Zaretsky), Yaroslav Abaimov (Triquet); conductor, Timur Zangiev) The orchestra is excellent, and, for me, the principal horn stands out—perhaps because his warm-ups include excerpts from Wagner (Ring cycle) and Brahms (the opening to Piano Concerto no. 2) that I recognized. The chorus sings well, but their dancing is horrible, which explains why the famous polonaise that opens act 3 is played as an overture rather than as a staged dance.
• The temperature in the box is warm, and I sense that L would like to fan herself, so I take my two Field Notes notebooks out of their cover and hand it to L, who uses it as a makeshift fan. There is a single intermission, between the first and second acts, and our two boxmates leave, giving us a chance to move to the rail and survey the audience.
• 1105 The opera ends. We leave while the clapping is still going on and make it out ahead of most of the crowd. (We do leave after our boxmates, however.) I try to keep us on large, well-lit streets for the walk back, but we still have to walk up a dark alley or two.
• 2330 Back in hotel
• 0000 Lights out. We both sleep pretty well.

Sunday, March 9 (Milano —> Firenze)

• 0730 Alarm goes off. We sleep a bit longer.
• 0830 Breakfast in the hotel. Each morning, the attendant asks for our room number. For my own amusement, today I tell the woman serving coffee, “Due cappuccini senza zucchero, e il numero magico é sei.” She is amused by my little joke—or possibly my bad Italian pronunciation. Probably both. I have mixed dried meats and brie on purple bread, red orange juice, and two cappuccinos.
• 0930 Pack
• 1040 Go to corner market and buy food for lunch
• 1048 Ares Market, Via Bandello 2 (€17.04; dinner food)
• 1054 Check out of Antica Locanda Leonardo; Antica Locanda Leonard (€682.80)
• 1100 Walk to Cadorna subway station
• 1118 Cadorna M1, Foro Buonaparte 61 (€2.20)
• 1130 Arrive Stazione Centrale, two hours before our train departs. We walk around a bit and then settle down on a concrete bench outside the main hall to eat our lunch
• 1230 Ham sandwich, corn chips, water
• 1300 Walk around a bit more. Visit the Feltrinelli bookstore, which is much larger than it appears from the outside. Buy a newspaper.
• 1316 La Feltrinelli, Stazione Centrale Milano (€2.50; Corriere della Sera)
• 1330 Go through the entrance to the boarding area. When our train starts boarding, we see that it’s packed.
• 1340–1535 Milano to Firenze
• Leaving Milan, we see closely spaced low-rise apartment buildings with small balconies and terra cotta roofs. The landscape begins flat, much like Illinois, then gets hilly as we approach Bologna. Most of the ride from Bologna to Firenze is underground, presumably in tunnels running through hills and mountains.
• 1535 Arrive Santa Maria Novella station, which is swarming. On our walk to the hotel, the sidewalks and streets are packed, and we are like salmon swimming upstream; everyone seems to be walking toward us. The cobblestones are large and rough and make pulling our suitcases difficult.
• 1605 After some confusion on my part about the location of the hotel, we find it: A former palazzo on the busy Piazza di Santissima Annunziata, directly across from Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti. The entrance to the hotel is a small door at the top of a long set of stairs running the length of the piazza. Our room is a suite consisting of a bedroom looking out onto the noisy piazza, and next to it, a bathroom about 10’ x 25’, with a tub and shower. The windows have shutters on the outside, and when the one on the left occasionally blows shut, I reach out the window to open it. There is an interesting stone border on the building next to ours.
• 1730 Go to the Conad grocery nearby and buy a 1.5 liter bottle of water and an amazingly inexpensive bottle of Rosso di Montalcino (about € 6). We then go in search of dinner. Walking up and down Via dei Servi, we pass several restaurants, all empty at 1800. One is a risotteria, which is intriguing. L defers to me for the restaurant choice, which always makes me uncomfortable. I ultimately fall back on a presumably safe choice: a pizzeria with specials that seem to cater to students. (The University of Florence is a few blocks away.) We sit at a table in the center of a covered outside seating area that accommodates twelve. We are the only customers at this early hour. A polite waiter/cashier with a dark beard and long hair takes our order: Aperol spritz, Greek salad, and artichoke pizza. While we wait, a group of eight students arrives, and they spend some time trying to figure out how to spread themselves across the remaining tables that surround us. L suggests we move, and I make a grandiose gesture to the students, who are grateful. Once we’re off to the side, the students push tables together, and all eight of them, now seated together, provide us with some entertainment during our meal. The Greek salad is surprisingly fresh, and the pizza is good. L remarks that the crust is the best part, and she might be right, but I like the ham, black olives, and artichoke. I’d say only the tomato sauce is lacking.
• 1852 La Cranceria, Via dei Servi 116 (€36.40; dinner; salad, 2 apertivo liscio, caffe doppio, capricciosa pizza)
• As we ate, it started to rain, and after dinner, we walk back to our room to pick up my umbrella. We walk to the Arno along surprisingly narrow streets with 1.5-foot wide sidewalks and fast cars zipping past us, inches away.
• 1930 We walk past the hotel where we stayed in 2003 (Hotel Goldoni) on our way to our favorite gelateria from that trip, La Carraia. We each have the smallest cup (€2.50). I have dark chocolate (cioccolato fondementa), and L has a combo that she says tastes like a Creamsicle. At the gelato shop, and on the walk back, we encounter dozens of American college students, and we surmise they’re on spring break. Florence, a European Disneyland. Milan wasn’t like this.
• 2000 On the walk back, we pass the My Wallit store and Casa di Dante to scope them out for later visits.

Monday, March 10 (Firenze)

• 0815 Breakfast in the hotel. We are the only Americans. There are four Germans and two Frenchfolk, but the waitstaff speak English to everyone.
• 0915 Back in the room. I watch the Food Network while L gets ready. Much to my delight, it’s Le ricette del convento, with two monks preparing tripe with beans and olives. I take photographs and post them to Instagram. It doesn’t go viral.
• 1015 Walk to the Campanile and get in line.
• 1030 We ascend the Campanile (365 steps) in three stages, taking a break at each level. (L wants to be sure to look out each window on each level.) The stairways become more narrow as we ascend, and whenever we meet people coming down, an awkward and sometimes difficult dance is performed. The view down the center of the tower is interesting. We spend a long time in the tower, and by the time we’re leave, one group has followed us in and another is queued up. The interior of the base of the tower has some fascinating architectural details.
• 1200 Walk back to the hotel, and on the way we pick up lunch at the nearby Conad market: a slice of vegetable pizza, a spinach and feta grissone, and a bottle of sparkling water.
• 1205 Conad (€6.09; focaccia with vegetables, grissone spinaci, flavored sparkling waters)
• 1315 Walk to the Mercato Centrale. On the way, we pass the Palazzo Pucci and walk into the atrium to take several photos (one of our dogs was named Pucci), including one of a medallion featuring a portrait of Orazio Ruberto Pucci (1625–98). Once we arrive at the market, we walk around the first floor a bit. It reminds us of the Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia. L gets ideas for gifts for relatives back home.
• 1330 Walk by San Lorenzo church, which I’d intended to drop into briefly, but there’s a €9 charge, so I suggest we bail.
• 1400 Walk to My Wallit, where L buys a handsome new wallet that can hold more cards than her current one, which she had purchased in Lucca in 2006.
• 1430 Walk to La scuola del cuoio. L is enchanted with the quotes from St. Francis’s i“Canticle of the Sun” in the courtyard leading to the school building. The showroom of the Scuola is bustling. There are several rooms, each featuring a different type of product (jackets, handbags, wallets). Some students are at work, and as we pass one room, we see one of them sitting at a sewing machine who becomes upset when she makes a mistake. In the showroom, L buys a dark brown clutch, and I select a small red change purse (to store guitar picks) and a mustard-colored bookmark. The cashier, whom we recognize as one of the featured artisans and perhaps one of the founders, doesn’t charge me for the bookmark (presumably because L bought the clutch).
• 1515 Santa Croce. We stop to look at the famous statue of Dante outside. We enter the church and walk the perimeter. We pass the tombs of Galileo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, and Rossini. I ask a guard in Italian where the Cappella dei Pazzi is, and he replies in English. When we enter the chapel—one of my favorite spaces in Florence—we are alone for a few minutes, and I’m able to take several photos and spend time contemplating the room. A German tour group soon takes over the room. We move on to the Second Cloister, a quiet, abandoned, and run-down—but charming—space with an old well at the center.
• 1645 We begin our walk back to the hotel by going the wrong direction (my fault). After passing groups of parents picking up kids from school, I check my phone and see we’re off course, going in the opposite direction from where we should be. To get back on track, we walk through some scruffy neighborhoods and see the Florence of the year-round residents.
• 1745 Back at the hotel and worn out, we rest for an hour before heading back out for dinner.
• 1845 Walk to L’osteria di Giovanni at Via del Moro, 22, the site of our first meal in Florence in 2003, when it was called Osteria No. 1.
• 1900 We have a wonderful meal, with a competent and cheerfully accommodating waiter. We’re the first ones seated, and the hostess-owner places us in a corner near the front of the restaurant. L has a view out a window to the street. I have a view of the rest of the room, which fascinates me. The next diners are an American couple in their late twenties, seated to my right. They don’t touch the delicious, salty bread puffs are offered on the house, and they order only plates of pasta (he, a papardelle with ragu, and she a linguine with a white sauce). She asks for a Coke Zero, which amazingly, they serve. Next comes another, older (50s) American couple. The man reminds me a bit of Nick Offerman. They sit next to the back wall, and at one point he talks at his wife about bourbon. A French couple is seated behind L, and they both have osso buco. Two Italian men are seated across the room (it appears to be a business dinner), and they both order the sea bass, which, when served, is deboned by two waiters beside their table. Most interesting, though, is a 30ish woman sitting alone who has a full meal with wine and never looks at a phone but occasionally picks up and reads a thick book.
• As soon as we sit, we are given a basket of bread, which is unsalted—something peculiar to Florence that always surprises me until I remember that Dante wrote about how he had to get used to salted bread during his exile.
  • Tu proverai sì come sa di sale lo pane altrui (Par. 17:58–59)
• We start with zucchini flowers stuffed with riccotta (L) and grilled octopus (me). L asks whether it would be possible to have a small portion of the pappardelle with duck ragu, and the waiter says, “A half portion. Of course!” I have baccalà (salt cod) with a red sauce and potatoes. It’s a bit spicy and excellent. On the side is sauteed spinach and a small salad. L feels she has eaten too much but still has room for dessert—provided it’s panna cotta. When the waiter appears to ask about dessert, I ask, “Do you have panna cotta?” and he says, “Of course we have panna cotta!” It is delicious, thick in consistency, with a dark berry compote on top. We are also served a small cup of lemon water-ice and biscotti.
• It was a wonderful meal, and we are in high spirits. As we leave, the woman who had seated us gives L a small bag of biscotti. I tell her we ate in the restaurant twenty-two years ago, and after thinking a moment, she says, “That was shortly before we bought it, when it was named Osteria no. 1.” (This corresponds to what I found later in my notes from our 2003 trip.)
• 2100 L’osteria di Giovanni, Via del Moro, 22 (€109,00)
• After dinner, we walk toward the river, cross the Ponte Trinita to the Oltrarno, then try walking along the Arno back to the Ponte Vecchio, but the sidewalk ends, so we cut to the right into the Oltrarno until we reach the street leading to the Ponte Vecchio. We proceed north and cross the east side of the Piazza della Repubblica, where I see that the Caffé Grilli now has outdoor seating in a fancy glass enclosure. (It was not that upscale when we had coffee there in 2003.) We walk up a street with a substantial sidewalk (Via Camillo Covour), which feels odd.
• 2143 Back in room

Tuesday, March 11 (Firenze)

• 0730 Alarm goes off
• 0800 Descend for breakfast. Cold cuts, bread, yogurt, boiled egg. There are mostly Germans around us. It is eerily quiet. No music.
• 0940 Walk around the corner to the Galleria dell’Accademia. There are hundreds of people waiting outside; Most are in a line for tickets. Since we’re early, we hang out on the corner for a while.
• 1000 We walk up to the timed ticket staff, and two young men speaking broken English happily and nonchalantly let both of us in, although I have a 1015 ticket. (L’s is for 1000.) Inside, it is as crowded as it was outside, and L is uncomfortable, since she forgot to bring a mask. We move into the long hall that houses unfinished Michelangelo sculptures on one end and David in an apse at the other. Most of the visitors are gathered around David, but it’s even congested around the unfinished works. I lend my mask to L and sit on a bench while she studies the unfinished figures. After spending no more than twenty minutes in the sculpture hall, we stroll through a musical instrument exhibit then leave. It was a mostly frustrating experience for L.
• 1045 Walk to San Lorenzo to confirm that it’s closed on Tuesdays, then proceed to Parione, a bookbinding/paper shop L had read about. I buy a small notebook (knowing I’ll need something to supplement the small Field Notes notebook I’m quickly filling), a belt made out of a bike tire (for my younger son), a packet of Kaweco black ink cartridges, and a miniature blank book (for my niece). L buys a 2025 journal.
• 1144 Parione (€96.50; notebook, ink, blank book, belt made from bike tire)
• 1150 Walk to Santo Spirito, crossing the river into the Oltrano. There is no admission charge but also no photography allowed. This was Brunelleschi’s last church. I’d thought I’d never been here, but looking back at my notes from 2003, we’d visited it then. It makes the same impression on me as last time: elegant and simple in design but spoiled by a highly baroque alter in the center. We pay €4 to see the Michelangelo crucifix in the sacristy (I think we’d seen it free in 2003), and this is the most satisfying part of the visit. Few people are in the space, and we can sit and think. As 1300, closing time for lunch, approaches, we walk out to a garden area, which is surrounded by walls containing graves. Each wall is covered with inscribed stone panels identifying the occupants. I don’t see any names I recognize.
• When we were sitting in the sacristy, I looked up options for lunch. Across the piazza is Gusta Panino, which has 4.8 stars on Google. I pitch it to L, and she says it sounds good. We cross the piazza and approach an empty table on the perimeter, but L holds back. “Let’s look at the restaurant around the corner.” Later she tells me that something smelled funny in the seating area.
• We end up next door at Gusta Osteria, which was fine. Our waitress is tolerant of my sketchy Italian and doesn’t flip into English. I’m grateful for this small kindness. L orders ribolitta, and I order a farro soup and a charcuterie board. The board comes first, and we enjoy eating the cured meats with bread and cheese. (Later, when L isn’t able to finish her soup, though, she says that it was too much food.)
• 1348 Gusta Osteria Madj (€40.00; lunch: salame and cheese, ribollita, farro soup)
• L leaves the waitress a €5 tip on the table, and she is appreciative when I mention it to her on the way out.
• 1352 We walk a short distance to the Carraia Gelateria (this is our second visit); L has a small cup of coffee gelato, and I have a small cup of butterscotch.
• 1405 Gelateria la Carraia (€5.00; two cups of gelato)
• We walk to the Casa di Dante and spend a long time with the three floors of exhibits. There are a handful of people in the museum. L is kindly and surprisingly engaged. The third floor features an exhibit involving virtual-reality headsets, and I have to sit down to use it (because of vertigo) and don’t keep my headset on for long, since L has no interest in it. In the gift shop, I buy a dual-language edition of La Vita Nuova and a bookmark—not because I need either of them but because I feel the need to have a souvenir from the putative home of Dante.
• 1611 Casa di Dante (€15.50; Vita Nova and bookmark)
• 1620 Walk back to the hotel. We’re both tired. We open the tall windows onto the piazza, and the lively sound of college students lounging on the stairs floats in. We relax for an hour. Watch the RAI Radio Orchestra perform Dvorak’s Symphony no. 6 on RAI Canale 5.
• 1800 I walk downstairs to the piazza and photograph three pairs of sky-blue orphan medallions above the columns of Brunelseschi’s loggia for the Ospedale.
• 1925 Walk to Antica Trattoria di Tito. Our path leads us through the university, but it’s not clear which buildings belong to the school. We pass a botanic garden.
• 1928 Arrive at the trattoria. When we enter, we are met with blaring music and graffiti-covered walls—not exactly what I’d expected and definitely not L had hoped for. Matters worsen when the woman at the front can’t find my reservation in the restaurant’s handwritten reservation book. (Most hotels and restaurants in Italy maintain paper records—even when they offer online reservations.) She seems skeptical of my reservation even as I show her my email exchange back and forth with an employee, Germano. Satisfied or not willing to put up a fight, she seats us in the crowded back room along a wall. From that point, the evening picks up. Our waiter and the other waitstaff are efficient and polite, and before long, we are acclimated to the music. We get a flask of sparkling water and a half-liter bottle of red wine (only €8). I order fried poletna with meat and mushroom sauces for an appetizer, and gnocchone (giant gnocchi) with meat and sausage sauce for my entree. L orders ricotta and spinach gnudi with butter, sage, and parmigiano and declares happily that it “as good as any food I’ve had on this trip.” The music continues, and when the people at neighboring tables start singing along to a song, I start Googling the songs and learn that almost all the selections are Italian pop songs from the ’90s.
• 2045 After lingering to finish our wine and water, we leave well before 2115, the time by which I’d assured Germano in an email that we would be leaving. On the way out, we read the posted Tito Rules, which made it clear that diners should “respect the tradition and enjoy the experience,” and the restaurant wouldn’t be tolerating any “tourist bullshits.”
• 2040 Antica Trattoria da Tito, Via San Gallo 112R (€53; dinner: polenta appetizer, gnoccone, gnudi, house wine)
• 2100 Back in the room. I take a shower while L starts packing.

Wednesday, March 12 (Firenze —> Venezia)

• 0630 Alarm goes off, and we both fall back to sleep briefly.
• 0650 Get out of bed and dress.
• 0710 Breakfast downstairs in the hotel. Cold cuts, bread, caffé americano, yogurt. I ask (in Italian) the woman waiting the tables what the yellow bread is called, and she answers that it’s bread that contains curcaro: “What is the word in English. Turmeric?” The rich golden color of the break is beautiful, but neither of us can taste the turmeric in it.
• 0745 While L takes a shower, I pack and watch another cooking show on the Food Network.
• 0910 Walk to the Mercato Centrale. Buy little bottles of limoncello and bruschetta spreads to bring home as gifts.
• 0938 Chirlanda Marco (€17.00 “2 x 8.50”)
• Then go upstairs to the expansive, high-ceilinged food court and buy a focaccia with salame and a croissant filled with pistachio cream from lunch.
• 0952 Mercato Centrale (€10:00; lunch: cheese focaccia, pistacchio croissant)
• 1010 Medici Chapels at San Lorenzo. For the past several days, when I’ve checked on the hours and cost to see the Basilica of San Lorenzo, I’d approached an entrance at the rear, which I thought was the way into the church. It turns out the church entrance is at the front—where you’d expect it to be—and instead we have entered the Medici Chapels. Still, seeing these spaces was worth the visit and probably more beautiful than the basilica. (I’d wanted to see the church because it was designed by Brunelleschi.) The stone that lines the spaces is breathtaking, and we get to see several Michelangelo statues—a couple unfinished—in the new sacristy. We don’t have time to see the basilica, and that’s OK, since I think L enjoys what we saw much more.
• Cappelle Medicee (€18.00; tickets)
• 1040 Walk back to hotel.
• 1050 Arrive hotel. L does some hasty last-minute packing.
• 1100 Check out of hotel and begin an awkward walk with our baggage down the narrow sidewalks of Florence. (We should have taken a streetcar.) We pass by a store with Opinel folding knives in the window. L asks me to go in and buy one so we can slice food in our room. Then we stop at a fancy perfume shop near Santa Maria Novella, where L buys some face cream for a relative while I wait on the sidewalk with the suitcases. From there, it is a short walk to the train station. We take the ramp down to the subterranean shopping level with the hope of finding an elevator or escalator to the platform level. (We are successful.) L says she needs a pen, and we pass a bookstore near the end of the shopping level and go in. I hang out with the luggage in the manga section downstairs while she goes up to shop. She comes back with a pen that she doesn’t seem pleased with.
• 1113 Paoletti Andrea, Via dei Pucci 13 (Opinel knive; €14.40)
• 1126 Design Collection di Miah Iqbal (€30.00)
• 1145 Officina Profuma-Farmaceutica di S. Maria Novella, Via deall Scala, 16 Firenze (€55)
• 1200 We find seats in the crowded waiting room and eat the focaccia and cornetto we bought in the market this morning. We share an orange soda. To my right, a college student reads an Italian textbook and writes in a journal. She looks at her phone and taps it a few times. A few minutes later, she turns to us and asks in Italian—then in English, once she sees the confusion on our faces—whether she could use my phone. “Certo,” I say. I imagine L is surprised. The girl makes a phone call, hands the phone back to me, and says, “Grazie,” which I answer with “Prego.” She gathers her things and leaves the waiting room.
• 1305 We walk through security to the train platform and wait for our track to be announced.
• 1315 Track 8 shows up on the board for our train, and with five minutes before departure, we hoof it to car 2, near the front of the train. It must have been two or three hundred meters. (On all these trains, I reserved seats in the first car thinking that would make travel easier, but in each case it has meant a longer walk.) After we board, I hoist both our heavy suitcases to the overhead bins. A 25ish-year-old Asian couple is sitting across from us, and they enjoy sharing snacks and candy with each other through the trip.
• 1350 Depart Florence, nearly thirty minutes late. Once again we are underground for nearly the entire trip to Bologna. Our speed at one point reaches 243 kmh (150 mph).
• 1605 Arrive Venice, in the rain. Walk out of the train station and go left, to the nearest bridge. We carry our suitcases up about thirty stairs and back down to the other side of the Grand Canal.
• 1630 Check into Hotel Antiche Figure. The desk clerk and bellman are South Asian, which surprises me, but it shouldn’t, given Venice’s history. Our hotel is across the Grand Canal from the train station, and our room is on the third floor, with windows looking out onto the canal from the front and side. Directly under the window is a gondola stand, which provides me with entertainment throughout our time in Venice, especially in the morning, when I’m waiting to leave the hotel.
• Walk to Osteria Cicheto, situated in a narrow alley. We arrive a few minutes before it opens, and we wait in the rain with a few other people. When the rolling door is raised, we are seated in a back room where there are six tables. There are photos on the wall, including a still from An American in Rome. Our waitress is kind and efficient despite the chaos in the bar area. L orders a burrata salad with tomatoes and anchovies and a paparedelle dish with pumpkin sauce and mushrooms. I have “traditional appetizers” (sardines with onions, octopus, cod cream) and bigoli with a duck ragu. (I was intent on getting the pasta with the “traditional Venetian sauce” until I found out it was sardine based.) A couple seated behind us, speaking Spanish or Portuguese, are engaged in a spirited but unpleasant-sounding conversation, and the woman abruptly leaves. Her polenta entree is served a few minutes later, and it sits there, untouched, after the man has paid the bill and left. A younger American couple are seated next to us and given menus. Five minutes later, they get up and leave. Joe Cocker tracks from various albums play on the sound system. It was a good meal at a restaurant I hadn’t researched. (I believe I found it in the DK guide.)
• 1840 Osteria al Cicheto (€86.50; dinner)
• 1845 Leave restaurant and walk a bit northeast, then return to the hotel.
• 1910 Back in hotel

Thursday, March 13 (Venezia)

• I sleep better than L, who was kept awake by the heat and the noise from the canal. I wake up early and think the sun is rising (it’s not) but go back to sleep.
• 0730 Alarm goes off and we sleep in a while longer
• 0800 Breakfast in well-appointed lobby, with white walls and compartmentalized spaces. Cold cuts and bread, which have become our standard breakfast. I have a caffé americano, which has also become the usual for me. L has a cappuccino, then a doppio espresso with cream, which she says is much better.
• 0923 Head out on an initial excursion. We walk slowly—frequently getting lost—to the Ghetto Nuovo, stopping along the way to take photos. We see a gondolier training a student in an untrafficked canal. L is intent on finding rainboots to pull over our shoes for our trip to the Piazza San Marco tomorrow. When we leave the Ghetto Nuovo, we head north to a main street in search of a hardware store, where, L has read, these boots are sold. The man at the hardware store is preoccupied with inflating the tire of a wheelbarrow. When he finishes, I pose my question, and he tells us we should go to a pharmacy we’d just passed. The woman at the pharmacy directs us to a larger street south. When we reach that street, we can’t see a likely possibility, and L asks me to ask the attendant at a news stand. I do, and he immediately calls out to a colleague at another stand across the street and instructs him to run an errand to buy the boots. Five minutes later, the errand-runner returns with three pairs of yellow, knee-high boots made of flimsy plastic, two large and one medium, clearly made to walk through water. We take a large and the medium, and I also buy a copy of the Venetian newspaper, Il gazzettino: €30. We take our purchases (carefully placed in a plastic bag by the vendor) and walk to the San Marcuola vaperetto stop, where we hope to get a traghetto across the canal to walk to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. There is none, so we end up taking the #2 vaperetto down the canal to the Accademia stop. We stroll around a bit, again at (for me) a slow pace. I look on Google Maps for lunch possibilities and score: Osteria al Squero, a small place with sandwiches and cicchetti. There are only a few seats, and we situate ourselves on a narrow bench. We each get a panino (mortadella for me and ham for L) and a glass of prosecco. It was a light but tasty lunch, and, surprisingly, L was charmed by the place.
• 1206 Osteria al Squero (€12.00) Afterwards, L wants gelato, and down the same street we find Gelateria lo Squero, where I was pleased to order entirely—and successfully—in Italian. (“Un cono piccolo con nocciola e un altro con pistacchio.”)
• 1233 Gelateria Lo Squero (€4.40; two gelato cones) As we eat our cones, we watch a workman across the small canal repair the bottom of a gondola by applying a sealant and buffing it. He is working in what seems to be a gondola repair shop. Other boats are arranged on a rack near him. We stroll around a bit more, ever slowly.
• 1300 Peggy Guggenheim Collection. A fairly esoteric collection of twentieth-century art. We spend a bit of time looking at the large number of sculptures in the courtyard next to the mansion. Once we enter the museum, we encounter a group of bored high school students moving slowly through the museum as a guide drones on at them. We do our best to steer clear of them throughout our visit. Highlights: a couple of small Paul Klee paintings, the Magritte used as a model for the cover of Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky, several Calder mobiles.
• 1450 Leave Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Walk toward Punta della Dogana. We pass a small glass shop, and L buys earrings for a friend. We then move on to Santa Maria della Salute, a church with a large, high dome. As we enter, we see a poster advertising organ recitals every day at 1530.
• 1530 Sit in front of the alter for ten minutes of a concert of odd late 19th-century organ music performed sloppily.
• 1545 Leave church and proceed to the point, where I take a few photos in the direction of the Basilica San Marco. Walk back on the south side of the point, and we have to walk a bit more than we’d thought to find an alley going to the north side of the point and the Salute vaporetto stop.
• 1620 Vaporetto from Salute to Stazione Ferrovia. Almost as soon as we board, a short El Salvadorian woman begins talking to us in pretty good English and doesn’t stop until we reach the train station. We learn that she lives in a small town between Milano and Torino with her husband. They maintain an orchard as a hobby. Her daughter, who went to UC Davis, has a dog, and she has cats. She’s in town for a meeting of orchardists. After ten minutes of her nonstop talking, I disengage to take in the passing scenery and let L take over. At one point, the woman is distracted by a cute but fearsome-looking black French bulldog named Paolo, who jumps up and puts his front paws on her leg, which she enjoys
• 1700 Back in hotel room. We relax, and I catch up on writing this travel narrative.
• 1830 Walk an extraordinarily convoluted but interesting path across Santa Croce and San Polo to tonight’s restaurant, Trattoria alla Madonna. On the way, we walk along dimly lit but heavily walked alleys and pass many shops and restaurants. When we step into the trattoria, I’m put off by the bright lighting, white walls, and high ceiling. It almost has the feel of an institutional cafeteria. On the left is a display case filled with fresh fish of various types and colors. A South Asian waiter seats us at a table in the center of the room next to a 30ish couple who speak an East European–flavored language (possibly Slovenian?) to each other, but she speaks fluent English to the waiter. She is pushy and demanding. (“Take this away please,” with a wave of the hand; “This is not what I ordered,” then points to a photo of the intended item on her phone.) L orders safely: insalata caprese and a traditional lasagna. When L’s caprese salad is served, she hears the pushy woman say something to her partner about “caprese” and “americanicshe,” and L assumes (possibly correctly, possibly not) that she was saying something disparaging about her food choice. I order with more adventure: a seafood appetizer including shrimp, cuttlefish, some black creatures (could be mussels), gray-white scampi-like shellfish. All were served cold. This was followed by a fish stew in a light, red-tinted broth, served with a plate of sliced, stale bread for soaking. The waiters are formal and efficient. There’s a large group of merry Americans of all ages at a corner table. We choose not to have dessert. (I suspect L wanted to get away from the Slovakian couple.) Just before we leave, the pushy woman calls the waiter over and says, “We’d like to eat something else. With red sauce. What would you recommend? Between the lasagna and ravioli?” Her casually complaining partner says, with a fling of his hand, “Ravioli, ravioli!” Before we leave, I notice large copper pots hanging from the ceiling. They remind me of the large copper pots owned by a Turkish friend in Toronto, and I assume these are also Turkish, but the waiter tells me they are old Venetian cooking pots.
• 2015 Trattoria alla Madonna (€98.00; dinner)
• We take the vaporetto from Rialto to Ferrovia. It’s a #2 (the express), so the ride is quick.

Friday, March 14 (Venezia)

• 0730 Wake up and dress
• 0800 Go downstairs for breakfast. Have the usual breakfast: cold cuts, cheese, boiled egg, and today, walnut cake.
• 0900 Back in room; watch a bit of Recipes of the Cloister, with this episode featuring a dish containing sheep testicles. There are three featured monks on the show: an elderly one on the left; a tall, gawky one with glasses on the right; and a third who is not present during the food preparation and seems to do little more than sing as he approaches the kitchen and eat what the other two have worked hard to make. He almost always waves the hand holding the fork in a circular motion as he says “Buono!”
• 0930 We decide to take the vaporetto to San Marco rather than to walk, and we take one that goes the long way around (#4.1 or #4.2), away from the tourist attractions, making stops on Giudecca along the way. Instead of passing ornate palazzi as we would on the Grand Canal, we pass docks and warehouses and ferry stations. It is raining, and we are hit with mist—a gray, dreary day. Most of the passengers are Venetians on their way to work. There is a young couple with a two-year-old in a harness attached to her father’s back. She prods him to jump up and down by jumping up and down herself. We see many dogs on the vaporetti, and these please L.
• 1020 After about half an hour on the vaporetto, enduring rain and mist, we alight at the San Marco-Zaccaria stop. It is still raining, so I put up my umbrella. We walk east, around the southwest corner of the Palazzo Ducale to the front of the Basilica di San Marco, where there are hundreds of people waiting in two lines. We stand on elevated ramps set up to keep tourists above the often-flooded piazza. (We did not bring the rainboots we’d bought yesterday.) We have “skip the line” tickets, but even with these, there is a line of about one hundred people. Once we’re inside, we quickly see this will not be liked the other church visits we’ve made. Visitors can’t roam the floor at will. There’s a prescribed path from the entrance to a golden chapel (for which there’s an additional €5 fee, and we skip it), across the front, and then down the left aisle, ending at the entrance to a church museum and the staircase to St. Mark’s Horses, which are on a terrace outside the church. We slowly move along with the herd. I snap pictures along the way. The interior is unlike that of any church we’ve visited so far. The Byzantine influences are distinctive. On the way out, we sit in a large area designated for prayer, just to stop and rest. I take a few photos. A couple of minutes later a church staff member loudly admonishes someone else for taking a photo.
• 1130 We have an hour to kill before our lunch reservation. After leaving the basilica, we walk along the loggia on the north side of the Piazza di San Marco. I take a few photos looking back at the basilica. We pass by the Olivetti Showroom, a place I would enjoy seeing if I were on my own, but it’s hard to imagine taking L there. I take a few photos of typewriters and office machines in the windows. It’s only a twelve-minute walk to the restaurant, and if we go straight there, we’ll be too early, so I quickly look up the address of Libreria Acqua Alta, a bookstore I’d hoped to visit, and see it’s only a couple of minutes from the restaurant. Along the way, we walk through the famous fish market, not realizing that in a few minutes we would be eating fish bought there. Once we arrive, I can see it’s a fine bookstore, but it’s also swamped with tourists. There’s an excellent selection of Italian literature and books on Venice. Copies of this year’s hot priest calendar are on display in several places. I wish we had more time to browse. L buys a cat calendar for a friend. We move on to the restaurant.
• 1230 Osteria alle Testiere. Easily the best meal of the trip. L says it might be the best meal she’s ever had. We follow two English men (one older than us, the other slightly younger, and his Italian is good—or at least better than mine) into the restaurant, which holds no more than twenty people. L selects the center table on the left wall. The head waiter (and co-owner) greets us in Italian and is accommodating of my mediocre Italian. I order dell’acqua frizzante and un mezzo litro di vino bianco della casa (which I clumsily refer to as vino di casa), and we look at the menu. L says she’s thinking about the smoked burata with anchoivies, then the turbot dish (filetto di rombo agli agrumi, spezi ed erbe aromatiche). The gnochetti with little squids in a cinnamon sauce and the branzino (filetto di branzino di laguna ai capperi di Pantelleria ed olive taggiasche) catch my eye. When the co-owner returns, I order for both of us in Italian, although I should have learned by now that ordering for L—in Italian or in English—is almost always a mistake, as it was this time. “Wait! What did you order for me?” “The burrata and the turbot.” “OK,” she says. When the waiter leaves, she makes it clear she hadn’t intended to order the burrata—that she was going to share the gnochetti with me. Fortunately, when the burrata arrives, she’s overjoyed. The anchovies come in a porcelain dish shaped like a fish tin, with a lid that has a small pull handle like a metal pop top. She says she’s glad I made the mistake. Next, after an expansive break, comes the fish courses (branzino and turbot). (The host mentioned that he buys the fish each morning at the fish market we’d passed an hour ago.) My branzino is extraordinarily tender and is covered with a sauce containing small black olives. The plate of vegetables, “selected from our garden” and strongly recommended by the host, includes radicchio, carrots, cauliflower, and was sauteed perfectly. Lisa loves her turbot. After another pause, while the host serves the tables around us, a third man, neither the host nor the chef, comes by for our dessert order. Lisa wants a double espresso, and I decided to get an espresso. I had heard the Brit a couple of tables over (the one who speaks good Italian) order a caffé machiatto, explaining to his companion that “Italians never say ‘espresso.’ To them the espresso is ‘caffe.’” I pick up on this and order a caffé machiatto for me and a double espresso for L. Also a “panna cotta con due cuchiaio,” and the man, with a smile, corrects my pronunciation of cucchiai. The panna cotta arrives with cherries on top, and we both begin praising it. Well before the coffees arrive, it is gone. And I am served an espresso with a splash of milk, as expected.
• 1415 The restaurant begins clearing out. L and I tag-team trips to the bathroom, whose walls are lined with published photos and reviews of the restaurant—for example, one including a shot of Meryl Streep with the host. I take photos of the walls. We sit for another half hour nursing the end of the flask of water while the Swedes next to us have a grappa, and the host, with his back to us, stands at the table the Brits had vacated and inserts the evening menus into their portfolios. I keep expecting him to take a break and tend to our bill, but that’s OK. L is beaming, having eaten one of the best meals of her life.
• 1500 We finally settle the bill, and the host puts on his jacket and leaves ahead of us. On the way out, he thanks us profusely and hopes we’ll return.
• 1509 Osteria alle Testiere, Calle del Mondo Novo, Castello 5801 (€167.00)
• Walk to Campo Giacomo, a large, quiet piazza that L has wanted to see. We sit on an empty bench and enjoy the peace. I watch and photograph a seagull diving into a garbage can and coming out with a beakful of something, which attracts the attention of dozens of pigeons, who surround us and then disappear when it’s clear the seagull isn’t sharing. L sees a grocery across the piazza, and we drop in to buy provisions for our preconcert dinner: mixed sliced meats; dense, thinly sliced German-style bread; sliced, smoked caciocavallo.
• 1612 Coop Alleanza, Via Santa Croce 1491 (€11.13; dinner: German bread; mixed salames, sliced smoked cheese)
• We walk around the corner to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, where we spend about an hour carefully walking around the space, admiring two stunning Titians (Pesaro Madonna and Assumption of the Virgin) and a large memorial to Antonio Canova, a 19th-century sculptor, with figures sculpted by his students. The experience is in marked contrast to our harried visit to the Basilica di San Marco this morning—an antidote perhaps.
• 1800 Back in the room. L prepares our little table for dinner: sandwiches and the red wine we brought from Florence.
• 1920 We leave the hotel, stop by the Ferrovia vaporetto stop to buy 24-hr passes.
• 1925 Isola nova Tronchetto (€50.00; two one-day passes for vaporetti)
• Walk twenty-five minutes, across Cannaregio, to the Teatro Maliban, arriving ten minutes before the concert. I ask questions in Italian about the location of our seats, and the young ushers reply in English, which continues to irk me. L remains quiet as we take our seats in the balcony, near the back, on the far right side. The concert, by the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice (cond. Enrico Onofri) was spectacular—perhaps the best orchestral performance of music of the mid-18th century I’ve ever heard. On the program:
  • Il mondo della luna Overture / Joseph Haydn
  • Chaconne in C Minor / Antonio Sacchini
  • Symphony no. 39 in C Major, P. 31 / Michael Haydn
  • Intermission
  • Olympia Overture / Joseph Martin Krauss
  • Symphony in A Major for strings, J-C62 / G. B. Sammartini
  • Symphony no. 26 in C Minor, G. 519 / Boccherini The first half was better than the second.
• The orchestra consisted of strings (8 first violins, 7 second violins, 4 violas, 4 cellos, 2 basses) with 2 horns, 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets, and timpani (trps and timp on first half only). The playing was elegant but spirited, and the ensemble was precise. Phrases were shaped effectively. The conductor was animated to the point of being antic. He stomped, crouched, spread his legs and glided from side to side. The timpanist played with wooden mallets during the fast movements.
• Two men and a woman enter the hall five or ten minutes into the performance and take their seats in the front row of the balcony. One man leans over occasionally to speak to the man sitting next to him, loud enough that we can hear him. They leave the theater at intermission and then repeat their act five or ten minutes into the second half.
• 2120 Notably, at the end of the concert no members of the audience stand while applauding. If this performance had occurred in the US, everyone—including me, someone who rarely participates in a standing ovation—would have been on their feet. We leave after two curtain calls, and as we descend the stairs, we hear an encore beginning.
• 2130 Arrive at Rialto vaporetto stop after I mistakenly take us up one side of the Rialto Bridge to the wrong side. I recognize the error at the top, and we walk back down the other side. Take the #1 vaporetto to Ferrovia.
• 2200 Back in room. During the night, we are both bitten by mosquitoes.

Saturday, March 15 (Venezia)

• 0630 Sun has risen, and I am awake, so I open my Kindle and read.
• 0730 L’s alarm doesn’t go off, and I decide to shower.
• 0830 Breakfast. Sliced meats, cheeses, rolls, cream-filled doughnut hole, caffé machiato and cappuccino.
• Trip to Murano and Burano. Google Maps suggests getting on a #3 vaporetto to Piazzale Roma (the terminus), staying on, then taking it back to Ferrovia and on to Murano. We queue up to do just that, the vaporetto arrives, and as everyone is boarding, the couple in front of us asks the conductor whether the vaporetto is going to Murano, and he correctly says no, so L immediately turns around and exits the platform. Later she says, “I trust the vaporetto staff.” We queue up in a much longer line at the next platform and board a #3 going the correct direction. There’s no place to sit, but it’s not raining and not that cold, so we start in the central open-air section, which has a great view for the 10–15-minute ride to Murano. We sit through the initial stops on the island and get off at the Museo stop. I look on Google Maps (a consistent and reliable resource throughout our time in Venice as we navigate its twisted, narrow alleys), and we find the entrance to the glass museum around the corner. It’s a fine museum, moving chronologically from Roman times to the 20th century. L is engaged and happy. We spend over an hour there, and I take many photos.
• 1230 L is intent on finding gifts to take back, and we visit a few glass shops after we leave the museum. They are all geared to tourists, and we leave each empty handed.
• 1300 I am hungry and lead us to a nearby bar I found on Google, Bar da Ice. It’s a small place, but there are sandwiches and drinks. Four workmen are standing in front of the food case and move to let me by. We later hear one of them talking in American English about the Roadrunner, who “looks like a dinosaur,” and the Coyote. I order (in Italian) a prosciuto sandwich, a pancetta sandwich on two thin grilled pieces of polenta, and two Aperol spritzes (my new favorite drink). The polenta is small, so L selects it once I bring the sandwiches to the table, but after taking a bite, she hands it to me and says, “Sorry, you’ll have to eat this.” The pancetta is fatty and not well done. I finish it off quickly and enjoy the spritz. We end the meal with a couple of butter cookies (a local specialty).
• 1307 Bar da Ice, Fondamenta Giustinian, 15, Murano (€16.10; lunch: prosciutto panino, polenta w/ pancetta, two Aperol Spritzes, two cookies)
• L says she wants to proceed to Burano. The vaporetto to Burano departs from Faro, so we walk to the nearest vaporetto station that will get us to that stop. I successfully ask a man at the station if we’re at the correct station for Faro, and he nods yes without smiling. We’re outside again on the vaporetto to Burano. We pass a former church on a small island (Isola Madonna Del Monte) that is slowly deteriorating and will soon be underwater. As we approach Burano, we agree that it looks quaint and appealing, dotted with small, brightly colored houses. As we approach the vaporetto stop, we pass a large cruise ship at dock. When we disembark, we walk to the small town center situated around a small canal. The sidewalks are busy with tourists from the cruise boat. We work our way through the crowd to the lace museum, which, thankfully, none of the cruise people seem interested in.
• 1500 We have about an hour before the museum closes. We start by watching an odd fifteen-minute video on the history of lacemaking in Burano that includes three performed excerpts from Goldoni plays. Afterward, we walk around the corner to the front desk, where twenty minutes ago a staff member had yawned while scanning our tickets. A young male staff member is now with her. I ask, “C’é un bagno?” and he replies, “Yes, there is a bathroom around the corner but we do not serve cappucinno there,” which the sleepy woman finds amusing. The museum proper consists mostly of sliding case drawers containing intricate lacework. A woman sits in front of a window on the second floor and does needle lacework. Lisa approaches her and watches her work.
• 1550 Leave the lace museum and slowly walk back to the vaporetto station to take the #12 vaporetto, which terminates at Fondamente Nove. By the time we arrive—fifteen minutes before departure—the loading area is filled with at least one hundred people. L had wanted to sit on the thirty-minute ride back to Murano, but it’s clear that won’t be happening. In fact, I nearly miss getting onto the boat. The ferry attendant starts to cut off boarding as soon as Lisa has passed, and I cry out, “Mia moglie!,” and she lets me on. We work our way to the back of the packed vaporetto, and once we’re situated, L says, “I feel like biting someone” and chomps her teeth at me.
• At Faro, we decide to transfer to a #4.1 vaporetto that will take us straight to the Ferrovia stop. (If we’d stayed on the #12, we would have walked ended up walking from Fondamente Nove, and we were both tired.) The #4.1 is also crowded, and it is raining. We are standing outside on the lower level, and I have my umbrella up, but it’s blocking the mirror of the pilot, who bangs on his window to let me know I need to put it down. Once the vaporetto unloads quite a few passengers at Orto, we are able to sit down in the front cabin. The pilot is a bit rough with the dockings, and there is always a heavy bump before we stop. (The technology around the vaporetti has not changed, I’m guessing, for decades—perhaps a century. There’s a pilot and a conductor, who tosses a rope from the rail to pull the boat to the dock, then secures it with a knot. Once passengers have exited and boarded, he unties the knot, and the boat proceeds.)
• After disembarking at Ferrovia, we go to the Despar grocery (“Despair,” as I call it) and get food for a dinner in the room.
• 1755 Despar (€14.85; dinner: coscette di pollo, torta ric/spin, murano cookies, apple, dates (only €1.49!), beer, water)

Sunday, March 16 (Venice –> Trieste)

• 0730 Wake up
• 0745 Breakfast
• 0830 L showers; I update the travel narrative; spend a long time looking out the window at the gondaliers preparing for their day and see them negotiating with a few early customers
• 1000 L packs; I have cabin fever and am ready to get out.
• 1045 Walk across bridge that leads to the train station then walk on to Piazzale Roma, where we see cars for the first time in days. Venice is not a city that is favorable to the disabled. There are no ramps on the bridges, so it is impossible to get anywhere in a wheelchair. Walk around a nearby park. Pass the social security building. An old woman who lives in one of the buildings stops us and explains to me how to get to the city center. I reply in nonsensical Italian, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
• 1150 Check out of Antica Figure hotel
• 1200 As we approach the stairs of the nearby bridge that crosses the canal, pulling our heavy suitcases, a smiling man stands in front of Lisa and says, “I will help.” He lifts her suitcase, then turns to me and takes mine and starts walking up the stairs. Lisa and I follow. She says, “We’ll need to give him something. Here’s a five.” I speed up, trying to stay within a few yards of the man, thinking there’s always a chance he will make off with them. He walks to an entrance at the side of the train station where there are no stairs—and fewer people around. Once he and I reach the door, he puts down the suitcases, turns to me confidently, and says, “Tip. Fifty euro.” “Fifty euro?” I say. “We don’t have that!” (Which is true.) “You should have have told us that up front,” I say idiotically. “Very heavy,” he says. L catches up to us. I have the five euro bill in my hand. “He wants fifty euro,” I say to Lisa. She turns to him. “No,” she says in her sternest voice as she shakes her head. She gets out another five euro and hands it to me. I give him ten euro, and he grabs the bills and disappears without a word. We walk into the train station. “Well, we were here almost two weeks before we got scammed. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” says L. “Actually, it was worth ten euros not to have to carry those bags across the bridge.”
• 1215 While walking through the train station, I see an announcement on the board about a strike scheduled from 0900 to 1700 on Wednesday—the day we’re traveling back to Milan. We have some time before our 1330 departure, so we go into the ticket office, and I pull a number for the queue. After my number comes up, I work with a helpful young woman who speaks good English. She says that, yes, there is a strike on Wednesday, but if we’re on a train at 0900, that train is committed to proceed on to its destination. She moves us from a 1000 train to a 0730 train, and there’s no charge.
• 1245 L grabs a seat outside a bar, and I go inside and get a fizzy water with lemon (for her) and a beer (for me), and we eat sandwiches for lunch we’d bought somewhere yesterday.
• 1301 Autogrill (train station; €5.60; beer and water)
• 1320 Board train to Trieste
• 1340 Leave Venice. Once we are across the lagoon and onto the mainland, there are wide expanses of flat land with vineyards, fields of grain, plots of small-diameter trees planted in uniform grids. The landscape changes at Monfalcone and becomes hilly and rocky for the remainder of the trip.
• 1545 Arrive Trieste. It is a beautiful, sunny Sunday, and the main thoroughfare is swimming with people. We take our time as we walk and stop to look at buildings. A local man our age stops and asks in broken English if everything is OK. I say, “Siamo benessimi!” and he smiles and we shake hands.
• 1610 Check into room 8 at L’albero nascosto. The clerk (whom we never see in subsequent days) resembles Adrian Brody. As he checks us in, he acknowledges that we’re American. “We don’t talk politics I guess, do we?” There is no elevator, so we walk up three flights to our room, and he follows with the suitcases, one at a time.
• 1900 Dinner at Adesso é cosí, which I had found a few weeks ago by looking at Google reviews. The menu looked appealing, and the rating was high. Most of the staff seem to be of South Asian heritage. I have a mussel soup (with a plate to discard the shells); potato side; misto fritto (all manner of local seafood fried in a light batter); L has fried breaded sardines. At the end of the meal, we’re given complimentary housemade limoncello.
• 2027 Adesso è Così (€71.00)
• 2030 High spirits after dinner. Walk aimlessly toward the city center. Reach the Piazza della Borsa by walking along the Corsa Italia. We window shop: mostly eyeglasses and shoes. Pass the Teatro Romano, Arcoriccardo (Richard’s Arch), the Joyce Museum.
• 2115 Back in room. Watch Ricette delle monache (Recipes of the nuns).

Monday, March 17 (Trieste)

• 0730 Wake up
• 0750 Our first breakfast in this hotel. Bread and cold cuts. I place a bowl under the muesli dispenser, press the lever, and miss the bowl, scattering muesli across the counter.
• 0945 Start our walk to the James Joyce statue. Along the way, we stop by a kitchen supply store and buy some cookie cutters (dinosaur and mushroom) for my older son and his wife, a metric shot glass (€16!), and little whirling candle holders for relatives.
• 1022 Emilio Cesca (€81.70)
• Make it to the Joyce statue, and when L takes my photo, amazingly, no one is near me. Scope out (on a very slow walk) several cafes that Joyce frequented: Caffé Stella Polare and Caffé Tommaseo (which seems fancy and pricey from the scant menus outside; we don’t go in). Walk out to the end of the Molo Audace
• Go into a nearby bookstore and buy Trieste guidebooks (Italian Touring Club, in Italian, for me; an English guidebook for L) and get a €10 bill changed, grudgingly, by the clerk, who also seems to be the manager. We realize there’s a second floor to the store and go up the stairs, where there’s literature in Italian. I find a copy of Le cittá invisibili by Calvino and buy it, along with today’s local newspaper, Il piccolo.
• 1141 Libreria Ubik (€36.10; Trieste books and postcards)
• 1156 Libreria Ubik (€14.70; Invisible Cities and local paper)
• 1210 Walk back to Caffé Stella Polare and have lunch: prosecco and trofie with pesto (for me) and fizzy water and eggplant parmeggiano (for L). It’s a fine place to watch people. L doesn’t like the looks of the pastries in the display case, so we get a caffé macchiato (me) and cioccolato piccola (L) for dessert. L was expecting an American hot chocolate, but this was a thick, hot, syrupy chocolate confection.
• 1301 Caffé Stella Polare (€41.30; lunch: eggplant parmesean, pasta w/ pesto, prosecco, dessert)
• 1320 Back to the hotel, where we take a break, and I read a bit of Il piccolo. We both agree we should have booked more time in Trieste. “Now we know,” I say. L is quiet. The chances are slim that we’ll ever make it back, but we could happily live here.
• 1500 L is not feeling well, so I venture out to the Joyce Museum on my own and enjoy it, although most of the content could have been conveyed in an illustrated book. The facsimile documents on display are interesting, but I would wished there had been more of them.
• 1600 Return to the room. L is still not feeling well, so I set out again, this time for Joyce’s last apartment, at Via Bramante, 4—the one where he lived the longest. (This was after he returned from trips to Rome and Dublin.) I hike up a steep hill with lots of fast traffic and narrow sidewalks. Once I reach the top, I realize I need to walk down a broad and long set of stairs (the “Scala James Joyce”) to reach the apartment building. In the Joyce Museum, I had seen a mockup of the doorbell panel as it would have appeared when Joyce lived there. I take several photos, including one of an inscribed plaque on the building: “Ho scritto qualcosa. Il primo episodio del mio nuovo romanzo ‘Ulisse’ é scritto.” James Joyce. 16 giugno 1915). On the walk back, I take a slight detour up another hill, through a historic garden, the Giardino di via San Michele. I see a sleeping drug addict lying on a bench. At the top of the park, a cobblestone street leads up to the famous 14th-century Basilica cattedrale di San Giusto Martire, where there are good views of the ocean harbor and other parts of the city.
• 1715 Back in the room. L is still in bed. I update the travel narrative.
• 1800 L is feeling better, and we head out to the Supermarket Despar in search of dinner. There’s a hot-food counter, fortunately, and the young woman working behind it patiently corrects me as I mispronounce spinaci and uova when ordering a stuffed pastry for L. I get a breaded chicken cutlet and roasted potatoes. L suggests we buy a bottle of Aperol, which is only €10, to take back to the US. We also get a bottle of regional white wine. All of this was a little over thirty euros. In the US, the wine and Aperol alone would have been well over that.
• 1837 Despar (€30.45; dinner: farro salad, spicchi patate (roasted potatoes), torta pasqualina (savory spinach pie), bottle of Aperol, Pinot Bianco Zorzettig)
• 1850 Back in the room, we eat our dinner and have Burano butter cookies for dessert.
• 1915 L gears up to wash a load of underwear at the lavanderia across the street, but when we arrive (after carrying the laundry down three flights of stairs), stocked up with reading material, I see I had misremembered the cost: €6 rather than €5. L doesn’t have enough change. We return to the room, and she dumps out the clothing on the bed. We spend the evening in the room. I read much of the ITC guide and the Piccolo I bought earlier in the day. I sleep well, although it is windy.

Tuesday, March 18 (Trieste)

• 0630 Wake up and read a bit
• 0730 Get out of bed and dress
• 0750 Breakfast downstairs. No English speakers: two German and two Italian. This morning I manage to get the muesli into my bowl without spilling it all over the counter. I have one of the cornetti L said were so good, but I regret it once I see how many crumbs it generates. L settles the hotel bill, since we’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning before the hotel’s breakfast service. The staff offer to put food in our room to have for breakfast, and later we find four yogurts in the refrigerator and several pastries on the counter.
• After breakfast, we sketch out plans for the day. The first order of business is sending postcards to the family. Mine are written, but L hasn’t started hers. Also, she needs to prepare herself for the day, which takes some time.
• When we arrived in Trieste, we’d hoped to visit the remains of the WWII concentration camp Risiera di San Sabba, south of Trieste—the only one in Italy—but it’s now clear we won’t have enough time.
• 1005 I’d thought we’d be out of the room by 1000 at the latest, but once again I was wrong. We head to the post office, where I get a number from a touchscreen kiosk and we start our wait. There are four categories of numbers: B, U, P, and A. Not sure what each is for, but mine, the P, is for postal services, which I’d selected from the kiosk. There are two U customers at the two staffed windows, and they are taking a long time. A third clerk (all are women) comes out, but she sits in front of her computer and doesn’t call for any customers. After ten minutes, we’re finally called, and a patient and helpful young woman listens to me say “Abbiamo bisogno di francoboli per queste cartoline.” She asks how many, and I answer “Cinque.” Then follows a bit of running around, including a trip to the back room, as if a request for stamps was novel—something that occurs once every few weeks. I imagine her searching for them in a box in the back and having to dust them off. She eventually returns with five stamps, and L pays the €12.75. I say, “Dove li messo?” (instead of the correct “Dove li metto?”) and the young woman takes it from there: she applies the stamps and whisks them away. (The recipients get them two or three weeks later.)
• 1030 Our next planned stop is the Serbian Cathedral, Saint Spyridon Church, which is beautiful. There’s a student tour group inside. (We encounter student tour groups several times during the day but no adult tours, and that’s somehow refreshing, although even the student tours become annoying.) There are texts in Serbian inscribed on blocks of stone set into the interior walls, and I use Google Translate with my phone camera to learn what they say.
• After we leave the Serbian Orthodox Church, the next stop is the 14th-century basilica on the hill, but we get sidetracked by a visit to a shoe store where we’d window shopped a couple of times. L tries on three pairs of Spanish shoes and buys two along with an “upcycled” handbag for a friend. We walk the bags of purchases back to the hotel, and now it’s time for lunch. I have my heart set on eating goulash somewhere before we leave Trieste. At some point in the morning, I’d walked us past the historic Buffet de Pepi, which I suspected would have goulash. The menu out front was definitely German/Slovak and meat-heavy (including trotters and tongue), but there was no goulash. A restaurant near our hotel with a German-sounding name does have goulash on its posted menu, but we see it’s open only Thursday through Sunday, and only in the evening.
• 1207–1323 Instead, we return to Adesso é Cosí, the fluke hit where we’d eaten on our first night. Today, at lunch time, the vibe is different. The restaurant is empty, but that doesn’t bother L, who is in a buoyant mood. One of the South Asian waiters who had taken care of us two days ago waits on us. Our selection is a bit odd, but the food is good. Gnocchi with goulash for me and a Siciliano pizza (olives, capers, anchovies) for L. A large, older man—perhaps the owner—sits at a table about fifteen feet away from us and is brought a salad followed by a plate of sliced meat of some type. I eat all my goulash, and L and I share one half of the pizza, then get a box for the rest. We have a good apple strudel for dessert, two espressos, then the complimentary limoncello.
• 1319 Adesso è Così (€54.00)
• 1330 After lunch, we walk along the waterfront to Molo Audace and stroll down to the end and back. We make our way back into the old city, past some Roman ruins we hadn’t seen before (an active archaeological site, with tarps covering the work areas) then over to the Via della Cattedrale, the steep, rough-stoned path I’d climbed yesterday. On the way up, we make a small diversion into the terraced garden I’d walked through yesterday (Giardino di via San Michele), with good views of the city and the harbor. Then we proceed to the top of the hill and the cathedral. A group of German students is standing outside listening to a lecture from a teacher. When we enter the cathedral, we are the only ones in the space. I think back to Florence and Venice and how a site like this would have been crawling with tourists. By the time we leave, there are four other people in the church, including an Asian mother and her grown son, who are intent on taking selfies. We leave the cathedral and wander next door to the bell tower. There is a €2 charge but a €1 ridotto. We have only €3.75 in cash. I ask the 50ish woman at the table, “Ridatto per i vecchi?” and she says no. When she sees we’re short only %euro;0.25, though, she happily says that it’s OK, and we proceed up the stairs. On the way, we can see evidence of the Roman porto that the tower was constructed around. From the top of the tower, among the bells, we have excellent views of the city and harbor from all sides, and we can peer down onto the site of the Roman forum next to the castle. We are the only ones in the tower. We descend, thank the woman at the table, and wander out to the forum. There are two student groups in the space, and one is standing in front of a statue in honor of “the fallen during the war of liberation.” We spend less time than we would have because of the students and descend the hill through the Remembrance Park and past the Arcoriccardo.
• 1630 On the way back to the hotel, we stop by the leather artisan’s shop next to our hotel. It had caught my eye earlier, and I’ve wanted a new cover for my daily-carry notebook. I was interested to see what they might have to offer. When we enter, I tell a woman, who I learn is the co-owner, in Italian that I’m looking for something for my little notebook, and she says she’d have to make something custom—take measurements, there would be some time. I say we’re leaving tomorrow, and she says, “Forse la prossima volta.” I’m struck by how I was able to have this easy conversation with her in Italian, and I assume it’s because she accommodated my errors in ways the others probably wouldn’t—and haven’t. Anyway, although she was cheerful and pleasant, she wasn’t particularly focused on making a sale, so I left empty handed.
• 1830 Dinner in the room. Leftover Sicilian pizza, farro salad (from last night’s trip to Despar), fruit, cookies, chocolate. Watch Luca Papagallo on the Food Network as we dine. Drink a bit of the Fruili white wine. Pack fairly quickly. Update the travel journal while L packs. I am quiet and intent on my work, while L is in dialogue with herself. Take a shower.
• 2245 Lights out. Takes me a while to fall asleep.

Wednesday, March 19 (Trieste —> Milano)

• 0430 Wake up and see that L is already awake and looking at her phone. Try to go back to sleep but fail.
• 0530 Get up. Do last minute packing.
• 0600 Carry our two suitcases down the three flights of stairs.
• 0610 Walk to the train station. The dark is dissipating as the sun rises.
• 0630 Arrive Trieste train station. Find a cafe and order two double espressos, then bring them over to the table L has found, just ahead of a crowd that quickly assembles in the shop. We eat the yogurts, croissants, and pastries we brought from the hotel.
• 0631 Lagardere Travel (€4.80; two double espressos)
• 0650 Enter boarding area and walk for about a minute to reach the front of the train. When we begin the trip, there are only a couple of other people in the car, but it fills up as we approach Milan. Two staff come through the car with a food cart and serve us large cups of coffee from an urn. (This is the first time we’ve seen drip coffee served on this trip.) We are also given unusual sandwiches: small rolls with a slice of chicken on them.
• Our route to Milan retraces part of the trip we made from Venice. At Mestre, we move onto a different track and pass through Padua, Vicenzo, and Bracia. As we cross the country, to the north we can see the snow-capped Alps rising high.
• 1115 Arrive Milan Stazione Centrale. We’re confused about the Metro—where to get it, which direction to take, etc.
• A couple of months ago, L made a hotel reservation for this return trip to Milan based on my suggestion that we stay near an M4 stop so we could easily hop on the airport train in the morning. After looking at hotels around the San Babila station, she said she liked the Aiello Hotel and made the reservation. When we arrive in Milan, I call up the reservation confirmation on my phone, absent-mindedly put it into Google Maps, and plot our metro trip based on what I see. What I had forgotten was the purpose of staying near the San Babila stop was to make it easy to travel from the Stazione Centrale to the hotel on the M1. Instead, we take a long trip to southeast Milan on the M2 to the very end of the line, and as soon as we get off the train and emerge from the station (Piazza Abbiategrasso), I finally realize something is wrong. I had a hint that there had been a mistake when we passed through the S. Ambrogio stop fifteen minutes earlier, and I heard “transfer to the 4 train,” the one we would be taking tomorrow to the airport.
• 1207 It’s not the nicest of neighborhoods, but we are both tired, and I think I can figure out what to do in the morning once we’ve settled in. We walk for ten minutes to the location of the hotel, and when we reach the address, it appears to be an apartment building behind a gated fence. No sign of a hotel anywhere.
• 1224 I explain to L that we aren’t where we should be. She sees that there is no hotel. I do a quick search on my phone and find the Hotel Galileo near the San Babila stop. The location is good, and the price is reasonable. As we stand on the sidewalk, I make a reservation.
• 1251 We retrace our steps to the Piazza Abbiategrasso stop. There’s confusion around the refillable train tickets, which I’m not able to top off. I buy new ones. We take the M2 to S. Ambrogio (ironically, the stop for the hotel where we stayed when we arrived in Milan two weeks ago), get off, then walk around to the entrance to the M4, which involves taking a series of descending escalators deep underground. Once again, I can’t top off the tickets, so I buy new ones. We take the M4 to San Babila, then walk five minutes south to the Hotel Galileo.
• 1337 Within five minutes, we are checked in and sitting in our room, which looks as if it hasn’t been updated since the 1960s. There are cigarette burns on the chipped veneer of my nightstand. The room is spacious and quiet—and clean, and for L that’s of great importance.
• (I’m surprised that transactional processes in hotels, restaurants, and airports continue to rely on paper. When we checked in, the staff of the Hotel Galileo consulted a 11” x 17” printout of the guest list, and our reservation—made an hour earlier—had been penciled in at the end. At the Milan airport the next day, we have to walk a piece of paper from a check-in attendant to a cashier’s window and return with a receipt to check our bags.)
• 1400 In the room, we eat the lunch we had packed: German bread, salami, cheese, prunes, ACE juice. (L loves ACE juice, a mix of orange, carrot, and lemon juices named after the vitamins it provides.) L says she needs to rest a bit before she goes out.
• 1532 It is beautiful outside. I propose a walk to a park. We head northeast to Giardini Indro Montenelli, where we sit for a minute on a bench and look out onto a fairly spare and uninteresting park, although there are a lot of people to watch. I check my phone and see there’s an English garden a short walk south, so we get up and go, and it’s much nicer. There’s a pond with dozens of small birds we identify as marsh hens after searching on pour phones.
• Walking back into the busyness of the city, we set out to look into a possible restaurant for dinner—Casa Lodi, recommended by Rick Steves. To get there, we walk around the Duomo, which is thick with people. We arrive at Cafe Lodi and see it is not open, and from the looks of the inside, it’s likely closed permanently. L asks me about grocery stores, and all I can find are express stores not likely to have dinner food. We go in circles, passing familiar landmarks, including a street-food restaurant, Eat Me and Go. “I will not eat in a place with a name like that. It is rude,” says L.
• 1730 Finally, after more aimless walking, we relent and return to Eat Me and Go. We get a panino with cheese, tomato, and lettuce, heated on a panini grill, and two bottles of water. We’re both tired and irritable. We take the sandwich to the room and eat it—not very good. L hands off the last bit of her half for me to finish. We take the elevator down to the hotel lobby. L makes some hot herbal tea, and we get a couple of bottles of water.
• 1900 Back in the room, I discover the TV can play YouTube videos, and I stream the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society broadcast of Nevermind playing an arrangement of the Goldberg Variations. It brings some peace to the end of a stressful day.
• We sleep pretty well, although when we turned the lights out, there is a loud group of revellers on the sidewalk outside our window. After twenty minutes, they move on.

Thursday, March 20 (Milano —> Philadelphia)

• 0615 We do some final packing
• 0630 Go down to the first floor (second floor in US terminology) for breakfast in a large room with many windows. We’re the first to arrive, but within ten minutes, there are at least ten other guests. Cold cuts and brown rolls; muesli and yogurt, then a caffé machiato followed by a double espresso—both from a machine.
• 0705 Back in the room; L finishes her packing
• 0735 We go downstairs, and I settle the bill.
• 0738 Hotel Galileo (€153.50)
• The metro stop is just a minute away. When we go down the escalator, I see a homeless man asleep next to the ticket dispensers. I try to top off the refillable cards once again, but when I enter each of them, I get the error “Card Expired.” I try to purchase two new cards using Google Pay, but I get a timeout error. I try again and it still times out. The adjacent machine is out of order, so I tell L I’m going to go back up to the street and find another machine down another staircase. I go up, look around for another Metro entrance, then descend a set of stairs that lead me down to a platform where L is standing. I’d made a circle. L remembers that she has cash, and I use a €5 bill to buy our tickets. L wonders whether we should leave our bag of food with the homeless man. I’m more concerned about getting to the airport on time and don’t answer her.
• 0755 M4 to Linate Aeroporto
• 0825 Arrive airport: The first, least stressful, and most pleasant of several mishaps: The woman and the baggage check can’t process our payment—either because her card device can’t read my card or there’s some problem with our tickets. She apologizes, and the three of us engage in light-hearted banter. (We arrived with plenty of time to check in.) She hands me a form and points in the direction of a counter around the corner. As we make it past the corner, I’m not sure where to present this form, so I walk up to the first counter I see, staffed by an older man and a woman, and say “Voglio pagare!” The man looks at me with some displeasure. “Quello vietro,” he says, while pointing across the room. I see a window with two women behind it. I present the form to one of them, and she pulls out a vintage 1995 Nokia phone and talks to someone in English. It’s Lufthansa. She picks up a second phone and speaks in rapid Italian. It’s the woman who had sent us over. She picks up the first phone and speaks in them alternately. Eventually, I pay the fee, and we’re set. We go back to the first woman and get our boarding passes.
• 0834 Air Dolomiti (€137.38; luggage fee)
• We have some time before the plane boards—and we have leftover euros—so we stop by a duty-free shop to buy some presents for our neighbors. I buy a Corriere della sera (€1.50), and we get a cup of gelato (caramel and chocolate-hazelnut, L’s choice) at a Venchi outpost.
• 0858 ClubAvolta (duty-free shop; €50.12)
• 0902 Dufry (€1.50; Corriere della sera)
• 0914 Venchi Spa Linate (€5.00; cup of gelato)
• 1015 We’re in line at our gate, but “boarding” (that is, boarding the bus that takes us to the plane) hasn’t begun. Twenty minutes later, we’re on the bus.
• 1050 Flight departs, 15 minutes late, which is a concern, since we have only an hour to make our connection in Frankfurt.
• 1200 Flight lands in Frankfurt. Pile onto another bus, and this one goes much farther. We ride for ten minutes. We’ll be cutting it close, since the bus will drop us off at Terminal A, and our flight departs from Terminal C at a gate near the end of the concourse.
• 1225 Leave the bus. Start a mad dash to gate C19. After five minutes, we hit an EU checkpoint and have to wait to show our passports to German Polezei. We then continue our dash. When we reach the entrance to gates C2–C20, we hit another checkpoint, this one a full security check—something we hadn’t expected, since we’d gone through one in Milan. We grab bins and hastily dump backpacks, phones, and jackets into them. I walk through the metal detector and am pulled aside to be patted down by a Central-Asian–looking man just a little younger than me, who asks, “Verstehen Sie deutsch?” to which I reply, “Ein bisschen,” so he continues in German, to which I nonsensically reply in Italian. He is carefree, and in response to my clumsy multilingualism, he replies in his own mix of languages. I have a pen and a wrapped cookie in a pocket, which I remove. He asks me to sit down and take off my Schue. When he sees the soft brace on my right foot, he motions that it to come off. In the meantime, L’s backpack has been pulled because of her water bottles. Once I’m cleared by the lighthearted security guard, I walk over to her lane to wait for her guard to return with her bottles. The clock is ticking. It’s past 1235 now, and the gates are scheduled to close at 1240. Once L gets the bottles back, we follow arrows to C19, which direct us to a large room with a high ceiling, and I see a sign for C18–C20 at the end. “Over there,” I say. A young man a hundred yards away, under the sign, shouts, “Philadelphia?” We rush to him, have our boarding passes scanned, then descend stairs to a parked bus, where thirty people are waiting silently. After all the rushing and scurrying, here we are, standing on a quiet bus that doesn’t move for another ten minutes. We finally head out to the plane and board ten minutes after the flight should have left.
• 1400 L and I are starving, and I pull out a package of beef jerky (purchased at a Wawa in Media, Pennsylvania) that I’ve been carrying in my backpack across Italy during the past two weeks. A few minutes later, the flight attendants come through with cucumber salad, roll, and brie. I call up Asteroid City on the entertainment screen in front of me, and it runs silently as I work on the sudoku in the Corriere.
• The male flight attendant consistently mistakes us for Germans, which delights me. He speaks[ to us in German, sees the blank looks on our faces, then says, “Oh,” and transitions to English.
• Late in the flight, I walk to the back and ask this flight attendant for two Aperol spritzes, and after running my credit card, I bring them back to our seats. A little celebration.
• 1700 Our flight lands in Philadelphia on time, but when we enter the large customs hall, we see two or three hundred people in a long, snaking line, and there are no more than than five customs agents. The line moves surprisingly fast, though. As we walk along, L strikes up a conversation with the man in front of us, who had also been on the flight from Frankfurt. He’s modest and soft spoken—a missionary, returning from Africa. I mention that our son had spent some time in Tanzania, and he said he had been there as well.
• 1800 During the long wait in the customs hall, I have been keeping Gary, our hired driver, up to date on our progress. Gary was our Lyft driver when we made our trip to the airport for the Newfoundland trip last year, and he had given us the card for his independent service. We’ve been using him ever since. Now that our delay has reached an hour, I expect him to bail on us, but he stays. Once we’re out of customs, I let him know, and about ten minutes later he has made it from the cell phone waiting lot to Terminal A. We pile in, and Gary takes us home, distracting us with enthusiastic, optimistic chatter. Once home, the dog greets us, we thank our nephew for staying with the dog, and after he leaves, we collapse early into bed.