Meat-eaters welcome!

Vegetarians beware! I definitely do not recommend Perseo, the restaurant Luca sends us to for our final dinner in Florence. For carnivores like us, though, it turns out to be quite entertaining, even if the food isn’t great. Flanking the door as we enter are glass cases—sort of like museum cases—containing three-inch-thick bloody steaks hanging on meathooks. The restaurant’s dark, with huge dusty garlands of garlic and red peppers hanging from the ceilings, and loud and blustery waiters running around in bloodstained white aprons, like butchers.

Used chianti?

A two-liter bottle of Chianti (also dusty) sits on our table, and when we order wine, the waiter leans over and uncorks it. He brushes aside our objections that we can’t drink that much and says, just drink as much as you want and I’ll charge you for what you drink. It’s that kind of loosey-goosey place. There are, however, certain inflexible rules, we find, about the bistecca fiorentina, which we both order, since Luca’s told us it’s the specialty of the place. The menu states in large letters with multiple exclamation points that customers aren’t allowed to order the steak cooked any more than medium-rare. That’s okay with us, until the waiter brings a vast cutting board to our table and slices our steaks off what looks like the hindquarters of a decent-sized cow.

That's a big bone.

It turns out to be rare, as in cool-red-center rare. Tasty, but a little too close to the living cow for us. We decide later that the medium-rare rule is to compensate for the fact that the meat is actually quite gristly. As we chomp away, we study our surroundings. There’s a picture on the wall next to our table of Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk who for some strange reason doesn’t have any hair. When we squint at it through the gloom, we see that a picture of our waiter’s head has been pasted over Lou’s. He laughs uproariously when we ask him about it and rolls up his shirt sleeve to show us that those muscles are all his. Somehow they don’t look quite as huge as Lou’s. . .

The Hulk? Or our waiter?

In back of us is an old piano with all sorts of dusty items crowded on top of it. Front and center is a large photograph of a naked woman, or rather, part of a naked woman. The picture shows her body from navel to mid-thigh as she sits with her legs splayed wide open. Interesting choice of artwork for a restaurant.

Now it’s the next morning and we’re on our way to Siena! We’re on a bus today rather than a train, a big, fancy, very comfortable, air-conditioned bus with tinted windows. I’m a little nervous, though, because our driver appears to be an eighteen-year-old thug with a chip on his shoulder. He’s got a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his shirt sleeve and chews gum rapidly as he whips the giant vehicle dextrously through the narrow lanes of Florence. We’ve already had one encounter with a poor little old man who wandered in front of the bus. The driver slammed on the brakes, throwing us against the seats in front of us (I’m sure I’ll have bruises on my knees!), then cranked open the door and threw his hands in the air as he berated the poor little senior citizen. Ma perchè non guarda!?

In the seats across from us, two young women, a Mexican and an Italian, are attempting to converse. Since I’m interested in linguistics, speak Spanish and know some Italian, I listen in, naturally. The Mexican woman’s asking, “Siena, ¿es bonito?” This is met with polite incomprehension on the part of the Italian. I nudge Rick and say, if she had used the word bello instead, her Italian friend would have understood, since it’s a cognate for the Italian word bello. He nods politely, but I can see his mind is on more pressing questions, such as our imminent survival. Will Rick and Annie make it to Siena alive? Tune in next week to find out! Same time, same channel. Ciao-