Chasing Lorenzo around Rome

Palazzo Venezia, Julian Schanbel, and the effects of karma

The Northwest Airlines employee at the gate assured me, yet again, in a syrup voice that our 4:15pm flight would leave on time. This despite the fact that (a) Frances had just told me the NWA.com web site was showing a 20-minute delay and, (b) it was already 4:05pm and there was, as yet, no actual plane at the gate.

I don't know about you, but I've never seen a flight land, taxi, offload, get cleaned, switch out crews, load up again, taxi, and take off in ten minutes.

Right after the woman lied to me about my flight, I noticed a man hurrying down the terminal drop a plastic toploader folder out of his bag without noticing. I picked it up, caught him up, and returned his folder. This will become significant, in some small way, later on in the story of my day spent chasing Lorenzo de' Medici around Rome.

The Melandris & The Mud Angels

Dinner in a frescoed palazzo accompanied by stories of the '66 Florence flood

I had dinner tonight at the apartment of Massimo and Vittoria Melandri in Florence. Their place was beautiful, a 14th-century building restructured in the 19th century, which is when they frescoed all the ceilings and the walls.

Gorgeous.

What happened to the frescoes

The ceiling paintings in the main salon where we dined were a bit obscured by soot, since (as explained mamma, Massmimo's 86-year-old mother, who lives on the top floor of the building and who joined us for dinner) two families were living in that small space during World War II, and as the electricity and gas were cut off, they cooked by building little fires in the middle of the room.

Massimo can't clean them up properly since they aren't technically frescoes but rather paintings on the dry plaster, so to remove the soot would also remove the paint.

Massimo had managed, however, to clean the 20th-century whitewash off the walls, which are (buon) frescoed with tromp l'oeil architectural elements.

However, the surface of the plaster is microscopically pocked and flaking, so the frescoes are milky and faded looking.

"They need to be wet to see them properly," said Massimo, and walked over from his chair to swipe a patch of wall with a damp rag. Suddenly, the colors burst off the wall in all their 19th-century splendor, only to fade slowly again as the plaster dried.

Brindisi, Waiting Room of the Aegean

I spend a day scaring up the best there is to see in the Apulian port city of Brindisi

Brindisi is, and always has been, a ferry port. From the days when the Romans extended the Via Appia here from Rome through medieval knights leaving for the Crusades to modern sun-seekers on their way to the Greek Isles, Brindisi has been where you step off the end of the road and onto the high seas.

Brindisi is the only Italian town where more road signs point to "Greece" than to anywhere in Italy. The passeggiata here is less an evening stroll than a backpacker parade of ferry-bound tourists killing time until their 10pm departure by restlessly marching up and down the main drag, their eyes sparkling with visions of Greek islands, their faces grimacing as they bite into what very well may be the worst pizza-by-the-slice this side of Naples.

There is little to see in Brindisi, but I was determined to find something to put in the guidebook I was writing at the time, anything to amuse the legions of folks who are stuck here daily, waiting to board the slow boat to Greece.