On Saturday morning I got up and had my, new, usual breakfast of Bran Sticks with blood orange juice. If bran doesn’t sound bad enough the Italians insist on calling it “sticks”. At any rate, it is better for me than the more delicious chunks of Parmesan cheese and bread I have had since I arrived. Since I found blood orange juice it is my favorite drink.
I was off to the TIM store for a transfusion to my cell phone, then an afternoon of just walking about. It was 3:00 PM when I realized I was hungry. I went through a few places but nothing interested me. It was all too usual. However, at the Lorenzo Flea Market the afternoon food-truck came by with food for the workers (like the traveling food trucks in Los Angeles…the so called “roach coaches”). This sounded great and definitely different. I ordered a tripe (stomach) panini (sandwich) alla Florentine. That was all gone… the woman indicated by showing me the empty pot. But behind cover #2 she still had stomach #4. That is the cow has four stomachs and she was out of the more popular innards and I could have the, apparently, less desirable stomach #4. It had a name that started with an “L” but I forget. I probably should have walked away at that point realizing that stomach #4 is closer to the “number two” end of the cow and therefore the less poop-ular (if you will forgive my bathroom humor). I ordered it. She chopped one of the very stomach looking pieces up and stuffed it into a hard roll that had been dipped in the juices. I declined the hot sauce but said yes to the unknown green stuff.
It tasted like stomach (I have had tripe before in the U.S.), although it seemed a little more intestinal; kinda like chitlins (intestines). Again, it was stomach #4 and closer to those regions.
It was a little like a French dip but with entrails. I chomped away…as its consistency fights you a little. And washed it down with an orange Fanta, while I waited in front of the Cappelle Medicee (Medici Chapels) for a tourist herd to leave.
Apparently it took marble workers several hundred years to complete these chapels. This wonder of marble is where Cosimo I and his lineage are laid to rest (his and his son’s sarcophagi are about 12 feet long by 7 feet high by 5 feet deep all of massive marble work). The lesser Sagrestia Nuova is the resting place of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Here are a number of Michelangelo’s unfinished works for the tomb. Quite impressive even if not complete. However it is the marble in the Principi that takes the prize and the height of the dome isn’t much less impressive than the Duomo.
In addition, there is a room off the Principi that houses every shape and size of adorned glass container containing pieces of bone and fragments of the cross. There are arm bones decorated like trees, vertebrae threaded with jewels, elaborately housed fingernails and every other fragment of humanity celebrated with jeweled and gold-leafed abandon. While I was in this room (containing nothing but these body parts) a girl wandered in and went running out with her hands over her mouth muffling the sounds of utter disgust. It was very amusing. The lower floors also have an impressive array of reliquary artifacts. Since I have been here I have seen so many of these purporting to be fragments of the cross that the cross would have to have been the size of a sequoia.
I meandered the rest of the afternoon then back to the apartment. By the time I got back home it was late but I wasn’t hungry… as the stomach #4 lunch sandwich was gathering momentum in my stomach.
Nothing ever came of the momentum but the picture sums up the feeling...check out the sculpture and from whense the liquid flows.
Here is a closer look.
