St. James Episcopal Church

So Sunday in Florence rolled around and I chickened out. I had asked a friend of mine who had recently spent some time in Florence where she would recommend going to church and she said the Duomo, at least once, just for the experience. She also mentioned an English speaking church that she liked. And I really really really really meant to go the Duomo again, but.. I have no will power when you promise me English at a service. St. James is actually known as the American Church in Florence. I was just beginning the homesickness we all knew was going to strike, so I could honestly not resist a chance to go to a church service I could have a chance at understanding.

I ended up walking across town and was still without a reliable method of judging time, so when the church bells started ringing at 10:30, I was convinced I was late for the service and I almost walked back to the campground. But then I realized that I could just sneak in anyway and that I could explain why I was late to these people BECAUSE THEY SPOKE ENGLISH and I kept on walking. It was a beautiful realization.

I was actually a good twenty minutes early to the service and so I poked around the church for a couple of minutes, unsure of where to be. I ended up walking up to the balcony, which looked like this:

Awesome stained glass window.

And this wonderful blessed pile of things and coat hangers.

I never, ever, ever thought that a pile of old things covered in fabric and stored away would make me feel better and slightly less homesick, but it did. Old things donated and over-used signal a church to me (come on, you know you've all wondered where those couches came from in your youth longue and how many decades they've been there). It was honestly, honestly like being home. I almost cried. Over a pile of junk. Travelling, as has been stated, does crazy things to a person.

The service itself was wonderful. There was a procession to a hymn in a real hymn book, and even though some of the things the Episcopaleans did (they brought the Bible out into the middle of the congregation to do the gospel reading! Whoa!) surprised me, it was still pretty familiar. They didn't ignore the fact that they were in Italy, though- the Gospel reading was read first in Italian and then in English.

It was Pentecost, you know, the day the Holy Spirit came down with tongues of fire and then people could speak in each other's languages? Man, I think about that story all the time. "Gee, I wonder what we're talking about." "Gosh, it'd be wonderful to know what I'm saying right now. Maybe I'll google it later." "Oh, for the love of all that is good and holy, I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON." Being an English-speaking community in an Italian city, the congregation of St. James is pretty used to the difficulties that communication across the language barrier can bring. So I found it interesting that the first story the priest told was about the best sermon he ever heard, going to a church in France.

He doesn't speak French.

Now, I've had this experience so many times it sent me running to the first English speaking church I could find. How in the world could the best sermon you heard be in a language you don't understand? Is this some preacher joke, like when they talk about finishing up early to we can all get to the K&W for lunch? Then he went on to talk about how the French priest had talked with such love and compassion, you could tell that he cared about each and every person listening to the sermon. It was amazing to the priest preaching to me in Florence how so much could be said without words, how many of the right things we want to hear coming out of the church could be communicated regardless of linguistics.

I want to hear a sermon like that.

So we all lined up to walk out the door and shake hands on the way out and I honestly can't tell you anything about the architecture of the building. They had a pretty organ? There were stained glass windows? Oh! Saving face! It was a hall church with an apse that enclosed the chancel! Yes! *does happy dance*

But I loved going to St. James. I loved shaking hands on the way out and having someone actually living in Florence recognize where North Carolina is. I loved signing in English (singing! So good!) and I don't care that I potentially missed out on the architecture of the building, since I got to understand the church.

Orsanmichele

I don't even remember what I set off looking for when I set off on our first afternoon in Florence. I was probably just trying to orient myself, looking for the cathedral and being able to place other buildings that I might want to visit. And, in an increasingly common turn of events that I hope I can turn into a metaphor for something significant rather than an embarrassing facet of my personality, I got distractedly lost. There was this big square building with statutes of saints, etc, outside. Add the sign and the beggar outside, and I knew I was right outside of a church. So I poked my head in. It happens.

The inside is also just a square building, but pretty well decorated. Then you look to the side and you notice this huge cage of gold and curly things. It's a tabernacle around a picture of Mary and Baby Jesus (yes, Baby Jesus gets two capital letters. Don't ask me why). On the left, there's an altar to St. Anne (the mother of Mary, grandmother of Jesus, according to wikipedia [not attested to in the canoncial gospels, which is why most of us don't know what that is... I think {don't tell me all my friends secretly knew of St. Anne and never told me!}]). My parenthesis are getting ridiculous.

It's quiet and cool and nice. There was this guy walking around with a nametag, which made me think he was an official sort of person, but then he stopped to read the sign explaining the history of the building and this made me think that he just stopped in on his way back to work, which made me think even more of him. Then he stopped someone from taking a picture and blew that illusion. Still, as far as church guards go, he's one of the nicer ones I've met. And he did read the sign, which is more interest than most church guards I've seen.

The history of the church is actually pretty interesting. It started out as a granary, or a place to store and distribute grain, but then someone drew a picture of Mary on a pillar. People started to pay their respects to the new picture of Mary just as do for all the ones on the street corners, and, after a miracle happened, the number of devoted grew so large that they couldn't use the room as a granary anymore. They moved the grain upstairs and the chutes they used to distribute it to the ground floor can still be seen.

Eventually, the guilds in Florence turned the whole thing into a church (now with a museum on the second floor) and commissioned Florentine artists to design each guild's contribution to the church. The statues on the outside of the building drew me in. I didn't take pictures, but Wikipedia can show them to you better than me if you click here! Donatello gets to make another appearance in my blog, which is a total win.

I love this church's story. I love that the current building was made to be a place of commerce and that the faithful turned it into a holy place. So many of the buildings I see were built for the purpose of housing a church. It's wonderful to see one that grew into that duty. Even though it might now just be a stop for tired sightseers, to whom any cool quiet place out of the sun is a welcome respite, at one point in time, faithful people caused businessmen to change their plans. And I like seeing that.

Florence Duomo

The cathedral in Florence is huge.

One of my selling points for my proposal for this whole thing was that you simply can't get an idea of what being in these spaces is like from a book. My primary example of this was the size of most of these cathedrals- I can tell you that the building is 502 feet long (like a football field and a half), 124 feet wide, 295 feet wide at the transept (which is almost a football field- sorry, I have no other good conception of distance [silly marching band]) and 75 feet tall... in the nave of the cathedral. It's 375 to the top of the dome.

I just...

I can't...

Like, what even? 

It's just massive. It's impressively big. Which is part of the reason why it was begun in the first place.

The Duomo di Firenze (or the Cattedrale Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Mary of the Flower [the flower being the lily, the symbol of Florence]) was actually built after the cathedral in Pisa and a couple of other less-well-known cathedrals around the area. It was built with public funds and set up as a state church in a response to these churches. They started construction in 1296 and finished the nave about a hundred years later (there were plagues and things holding up the project) and the dome in 1436. They pulled out all the local artist stops, which, considering the local artists were people like Donatello, is pretty awesome. Though, I always feel obligated to point out this graph when I talk about Donatello. The end product was the largest dome in the world until modern times. It's even bigger than the dome in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, and was, in fact, a model for domes after it.

It's an impressive building. The exterior is white, green and red marble (mostly white) and it's part of this complex including the baptistery across the way.

It dominates the view of the city from the Piazzale Michelangelo, about a mile and a half away. Climbing up the dome was the worst climb I've ever done, but the view from the top was absolutely gorgeous, so, still, my vote falls in with actually doing dome climbs.

I may have already used this one, but it's so pretty. Soooo preeetttyyyy.

At the same time, you know, with all the impressiveness, it didn't strike me as a particularly holy place. There's an excavation downstairs, which is cool, but right beside it is the gift shop. The gift shop. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think you should be selling things in a church. Outside the walls, in an ajoining building, sure. But actually in the church? Hmmm. Though, in the gift shop's defense, it is downstairs.

And see, the thing is, with these huge buildings, you have these side chapels (the top and arms of the cross, since it's normally laid out in a cruciform plan) and that's normally where mass is held. That huge nave? It's used for the bigger mass ceremonies, I presume like Christmas and Easter, but most of the time, it's only filled with tourists.

And I hate tourists.

Like, I really hate tourists in churches.

I mean, I realize that I act like one, but I generally acknowlege the purpose of the building, you know, as a place dedicated in name if not in practice for the worship of the God of the world's largest monotheistic religion, a gathering place for the faithful, a place of spiritual significance for people. But the person complaining loudly on their way out the door that they can't view a chapel because mass is about to be held in there or the group coming to a consensus that this visit was a waste of their time or the tourist with their camera who steps in front of a person praying in the pews to get a better picture of who knows which window Donatello designed, all these people are missing the point of the building.

Though if they were taking this picture I might be more understanding.

You know, maybe they're not. Maybe all these places I visit are just tourist traps now, designed to intimidate and remind people of the power of the bishops and the cardinals and the pope and the people associated with them. The Duomo has plenty of pictures and statues of the nobles who helped to fund its construction. And it does have a gift shop in its basement.

But I'm a bit opposed to this kind of cynicism. Because I remember that first moment of wonder as I stepped into the large, empty gothic nave.

And I like wonder.

Florence

On our first day in Florence, we were so entranced with the view from our campground that we didn't even leave the porch of the common area. I wrote and thought and in general enjoyed life and the cool air blowing off of the end of the Appenines in the distance.

On the second night in Florence, we walked over from our hostel to the Piazza Michelangelo to watch the sunset. There's a big copy of Michelangelo's David up there and so, along with what must have been half the tourist population of Florence, we watched the lovely sun sink into the bank of clouds just above the river. It was kinda crazy beautiful.

The next day, we spent time in the city, walking across that big famous bridge and finding our way to that one square, where we decided to meet up again. I headed over to the Duomo, climbed the dome unintentionally (the signs aren't particularly clear),

This: Unintentional.

This: The perk of unintentional excursions.

 got lost on my way back, found Santa Croce,

It's got a big tower, like the place I was looking for.

which was on my list to visit, and then proceeded to sit around for an hour listening to a man playing movies themes on guitar (The Godfather is popular over here) before another woman waiting on a friend informed me it was after 8. I was supposed to meet Christine at a quarter to six.

I hiked back up these stairs

They haunt my dreams.

 and found Christine at the campground (no, really, cellphones are wonderful things) and enjoyed talking to the people around the place. Campgrounds are a little different from any other place we've stayed. There's a lot more families in motor homes, a lot of people spending a long time enjoying the view rather than running on to see the next big thing. Florence is a city of the Renaissance. Painters, thinkers, scientists all came from or to here, beginning or continuing changes we still feel today. The science museum here is named after Galileo, who (I think) did some of his initial experiments with telescopes from here. And yet it is not a city that forces its history on you or demands that you fill up your itinerary or your evenings. I loved it.

On Sunday, I went to St. James Episcopal Church, the American church in Florence, because it was Pentecost and I desperately wanted someone who spoke in my own language. It was the beginning of week three and, if you hadn't heard, there's this rule of the threes- apparently, at three weeks and three months and three years, you get this crazy sadness or homesickness or something, Silly superstitions aside, I really needed to hear a Protestant church service in English. The only thing that could have done my heart more good would have been a Methodist hymn sing, but those are as hard to come by over here as Sundrop.

Sunday afternoon, Christine and I went exploring again, to attempt to find the museum that the real David's housed in to make a reservation. I gave Christine the map and we found our way to where we were supposed to be, stopping in this eerily deserted square first. After resting for a few moments, watching the pigeons attack the man on the horse, we decided to look around. It was a warmer day, so shorts and a tank top were called for. There was a children's hospital or maybe a museum that was confusing off to one side, and then a basilica on another. The basilica was having an all-day Pentecost prayer vigil, but I'm quiet and respectful and I figured sticking my head in wouldn't hurt anything. This little old lady stopped us just inside the door, though, pointing at our legs and our shoulders and lecturing us in Italian. We whispered that we were going and she kept on talking. I caught a glance of a ceiling like the one in Venice before we left.

I've never been thrown out of a church before. It's a new experience. God must really hate my knees. (PS, I definitely understand that I was inappropraitely dressed per cultural norms and that I should be more respectful when I enter another person's sanctuary and that my last comment is slightly uncalled for. Then again, I was just thrown out of a church. Go ahead and blame me.)

Still, wandering around and finding the museum closed (and closed on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. Sensical? No.) and wandering back was a good way to clear the air and remind myself of the beauty of this city. Maybe I loved resting here too much. There's definitely more to see than I saw, but I don't know that I'd trade one morning for another site to see and memorize for later description.

Our time in Florence ended with a surprise trip to Pisa, which was quite nice. It's wonderful to meet people and travel with them on their pre-planned adventures, and this was such an adventure as to merit its own post. On Tuesday, we took an afternoon train to Rome, piling once again onto a bus that careened along streets full of Italian drivers and motorcyclists, who like to think that they can drive anywhere they wish. This is partially true and totally frightening on a bus. On our way to our hostel, I was distracted by an old man whistling to himself and then a cheerful English speaking group singing together on the bus. Now, with the air full of people busy with their lives, it's easy to see how people got stuff done in the 16th century.

Can't get too comfortable with magic, afterall.