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| Romans and Jesus in El Puerto de Santa Maria |
This year, instead of celebrating the
entire Semana Santa in Puerto, we decided to see what Semana Santa in Italy
would be like. Todd had never been to
Florence or Venice, April is a great month to visit those cities (summer is too
hot and crowded), and we’d moved, giving up our front-row balcony seats of our
old house for the Puerto processions.
Sara and Dave Durkovich had also moved to Puerto with their two boys,
Olsen and Aden, who get along great with Tia and Sasha. It was a perfect combination.
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| Pals |
Still, we managed to squeeze in a couple of
processions before leaving. These rituals are so charming to me, I was sad not
to be here, and I insisted on running down the street to catch the beginning
from nearby Parroquia San Joaquin. The
way that the whole town comes together, the young guys preparing to carry the
floats on their backs, the families crowding the sidewalks, the tolling of
bells and scent of incense, all stir me with their ancient routine.
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| La Santa Maria Leaving San Joaquin Parish |
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| Even now, these white gowns and capirotas still startle me |
(video)
And then off to Florence we went. We landed first, the Durkovichs two days
behind us as our Spring Breaks didn’t overlap.
And we dove head-first into the land of gelato, pizza, and pasta, all so
ubiquitous and delicious. We grazed our
way through the streets, crossing the Ponte Vecchio with its designer shops,
the Uffizi with its miles of Medici plunder, and strolling the banks of the
Arno. In a tiny plaza we met a
Guatamalan priest; this was his first assignment, he told us, not bad! The tiny Chiesa de Santi Apostoli even had
its own processions in the equally tiny Piazza de Limbo, but that was the week
before.
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| Petting the Lucky Pig in Florence. If a coin you put in his mouth drops down the drain, you will return! |
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| On the banks of the river Arno |
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| Chocolate bunnies for Easter were a hit! |
As we chatted, the father’s English nearly
perfect from his training in Denver, he remarked that he’d also trained in
California. Where? I asked. Oh, in a town called Cupertino, in a seminary
on San Juan Road….which turns out to be the very street where I grew up, and
I’ve visited that seminary! Serendipity
at work again. The church itself is
lovely and subtle, in keeping with its 11th-century origins, and one
of the only churches left that retain its Middle Ages character.
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| The Guatamalan Padre from Cupertino! |
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| A beautiful little church, a great first assignment! |
A new tactic we developed this trip was to
watch documentaries of the places we were visiting. A fascinating one that both families watched
together was the building of the famous Florence Duomo. The city began construction in 1296 on the
Duomo with the goal of outdoing the great cathedrals of Pisa and Sienna, but
their ambition outstripped the technology available at the time. For over a hundred years the cathedral sat
without a dome, open to the heavens and a big black eye to the city fathers.
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| Ouch, that hurts. How to fix it? |
Desperately they sought a solution to how to
construct a dome of that size. The
problem was that the dome was so huge and so high that is was impossible to
erect wooden scaffolding to hold the bricks in place until the keystones were
placed. Somehow it had to be constructed
so that the bricks wouldn’t fall off as the slope of the dome increased towards
the peak.
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| The Duomo truly does tower over the city |
Brunelleschi finally solved
the problem, although he was extremely secretive, sharing the details with no
one and burning all computations, so it’s still somewhat of a mystery how he
accomplished this amazing feat. It’s a
great story; the Duomo remains the largest brick-construction dome in the
world.
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| Secret brickwork design by Brunelleschi |
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How DID Brunelleschi figure out how to build that dome??
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| Friends with a view |
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| Still not too old to ride a carousel |
Four days were too short to see Florence,
especially since we spent one day in Pisa climbing the Leaning Tower. Closed for over ten years to the public, we
happily climbed up the leaning staircase
and out over the charming city of Pisa. One
more for my bucket list!
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| Whoah, that looks dangerous! |
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| The Duomo was meant to beat out this beauty of a cathedral |
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| Beautiful and Bella (ha, ha) |
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| Helping out |
We saw as much as the kids could stomach of
the Uffizi, gawking at the Greek and Roman art the Medicis had accumulated; the
kids knew lots about Greek and Roman mythology from the Rick Riordan book
series. Then a quick trip to the
Galileo museum to pay homage to the great scientist, and off we went to Venice.
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| Italy: Beautiful women... |
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| ...and handsome men! |
Venice was packed this Easter weekend, and
with just two days there, we saw the Piazza San Marcos, went glass shopping in
Muriano, and of course ate well. But the
highlight again was the documentary explaining just how Venice had been
constructed on the soft, swampy ground that the early Venetians fled to in
order to escape the maurading Gothic and Hun hordes.
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| The Venetians constructing their hideaway |
To create a platform strong enough to bear
the massive weight of something like the Cathedral San Marcos, they took long,
narrow poles from the nearby forests and sharpened the tips, then drove them
down into the muck. Do this many
thousands of times over, and voila! You
have a foundation steady enough to build on, including the immense churches
that dot these islands.
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| Skirting the rising tide in Piazza San Marco |
Unfortunately the tides and sea level seem
to be rising, as well as some sinking going on; Venice’s long-term future is
uncertain. We noted the standing water
in Piazza San Marcos which rose and fell with the tides, and the kids were not
persuaded by the explanation of waste from houses being flushed by the tidal
flow. But then, they loved the gelato!
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| One of the best things about Italy |
Once back in Puerto, we started gearing up
for the feria season, even though I already knew that the wedding we would
attend in May meant missing the whole Puerto feria. Oh well, there’s always next year!
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| Viva la feria! |
