Sunday, 22 October, Free day in Florence, Hotel Brunelleschi

Written 7 March 2023

For Sunday breakfast, I ordered poached eggs, which were perfect and came balaced on these little toast "donuts" and capped with the donut holes. The toast wasn't such a much—more like dried-out bread—so I pushed it aside and ate the delicious eggs with pastries instead.

On this day, the cold cuts included lovely smoked salmon as well as these neat, sanitary, and attractive little "hamster balls" of salad. Great idea, that.

This was our entirely free day in Florence—Anna held "office hours" in the morning for anyone wanting ideas, directions, help with reservations, etc. This was the day on which we could have visited the Pitti Palace, followed the Vasari corridor or just walked over the Ponte Vecchio, gone back to the central market, gone back to one of the museums for a longer look, or taken a half-day winery tour by van or vespa. But we didn't. David still wasn't feeling up to snuff, and I was a little burned out and wanted to work on this diary. So we took it easy in the morning, then went out to lunch.

We'd been hearing about the famous Florentine beef steaks, and Sunday lunch was the only place they would fit into our schedule (we had booked our included dinner in the hotel's second-tier restaurant for Sunday supper). The restaurant at the left here was right across the street from the hotel, so we went there. Actually, its side windows were right across the street; we had to walk a ways around the corner to find the entrance. Behind David, you can see part of the glass case in which they displayed their wares to passers-by on the sidewalk. A "paiolo" is a pot or cauldron.

At the right is a closer view of a couple of the t-bones (or perhaps porterhouses?) in that case.

We encountered this form of bread service in several informal restaurants. Each diner was issued a small paper bag of bread tacked shut with a little decorative seal.

David started with "pappa al pomodoro," Tuscan bread soup with tomatoes, which turned out to be this heap of chopped fresh tomato and chopped bread seasoned and marinated together. He said it was great, like a very chunky gazpacho. That's a big sprig of fresh basil on top.

My starter was "mixed crostini on grilled polenta." Four slices of grilled polenta were topped with, clockwise from the left, stewed eggplant, meat and tomato sauce, liver pâté, and Gorgonzola sauce. All the polenta we were served on this trip was of this warmed-over type, but on some menus I saw "soft polenta" mentioned—that must be the freshly made stuff.

For the main course, we ordered a ribeye on the bone, large enough to share. But here, I made a serious mistake. When the waiter specified that Florentine beefsteak was customarily cooked rare, was that okay, I hesitated fractionally and glanced at David to make sure that was okay with him, in case his stomach wasn't back to normal. But he was looking elsewhere and before I could get his attention, the waiter misinterpreted my hesitation, said, "Okay! No blood!," and pfwt! was gone. Drat. What you see at the left is what we got. In European restaurants, steaks large enough for more than one person are customarily grilled, then cut into strips perpendicular to the bone, each attached to the bone at one end. For ours, they had cut the strips from the bone, turned them on their sides, and cooked them more, to barely medium rare. It was still very good, and David (who hadn't eaten in 24 hours) scarfed it down with relish, but I was disappointed we didn't get the full Florentine beefsteak experience.

On the side, we got a plate of garlicky roasted potato wedges (right).

Written 9 March 2024

After lunch, we strolled over the to the cathedral square so that David could get a better look at the Brunelleschi dome and I could get a better look at the Baptistry doors.

Here are closer views of a couple of the panels, which are incredibly detailed. Casting bronze in molds with all those fiddly little nooks and crannies is iextremely difficult, and making those doors took many years from inception to intallation.

After our walk, we went back to the hotel and once again took it easy until supper time. Our deal with Tauck included one dinner at the hotel's "lesser" restaurant, the Osteria Pagliazza, scheduled at our convenience any time during our visit to Florence. The name comes from the name of the tower; in the 12th century, it was in use as a women's prison, and the name comes from "paglia," straw, because of the straw bedding used there. No one is sure when it was built, but they all agree it was sometime between the 6th and 8th centuries AD. The restaurant is on the ground floor, directly below the Michelin-rated restaurant where we ate on the first night.

At the left is a view of part of the vaulted ceiling of the dining room. At the right is the base of my water glass. Each glass had a perfectly round red glass marble embedded in it. Much more attractive than the confetti-colored glasses upstairs.

Each table was decorated with a real but preserved (soft and leathery) rose, tucked into a tilted ceramic pot.

At the right is the amuse-bouche, consisting, according to the waiter, of zucchini, "cappino" cheese (spelling?), orange gel, and dill. (The orange gel was the little dome behind the the dill sprig.)

Next came carpaccio of beef with a few truffle slices, some fried spaghetti of potato, and some chicken liver pâté. The red spots are port reduction.

In the view at the right, I've pushed the potato aside, so you can see the spiral of pâté piped onto the plate (of which I've already taken a bite) and the two slices of carpaccio.

Next came cavatelli pasta with fava beans, bacon, and a peccorino cream.

The bread service was threefold: left to right, seed bread in slices, cubes of foccacio, and little round breads of paprika and olive seed. The olive oil served with the bread comes from a town about 30 km away.

The main course was eggplant baked with mozzarella, tomato "pizzaiola" sauce, and basil pesto, decorated with little orange (sunflower?) petals.

Finally, we finished with hazelnut ice cream on almond crumble, a choux pastry with caramel on top of something, and two domes of vanilla whipped cream.

Altogether a tasty and restful day.