An excerpt on an essay on my first trip to Florence, Italy, for a two-week workshop.

My Ph.D. advisor was a highly cultured, worldly individual, known far and wide by his universally-adopted textbook on quantum field theory, often telling a story of visiting a women’s college in Tokyo where he was to be met at the subway station by his hosts, but not informed how he would recognize them.  Off the platform and up the stairs he went, and there were three young women, broadly smiling, each proudly bearing a copy of his book.  After physics, it seemed the one thing of which he was most knowledgable was opera, often making obscure allusions to some egregious betrayal in aria during a physics seminar that was typically met with silent confusion.  I had accompanied him on a number of conference road trips up and down the West Coast, and one particularly memorable drive was on the 9 hour trek to Eugene, weaving up Siskiyou Pass in a pounding late winter rainstorm, his lead foot accelerating his VW Golf past 85 miles per hour, and Aida blasting at near pain volumes, hands off the wheel conducting the orchestra, and explaining the minutiae of the stage and how the tenor and soprano were finally together, forever.  Though not in Florence for this conference, he had visited the Institute a number of times previous, and before I left his only recommendation was that I climb the dome.

Out of the apartment before 7:30 am, my flatmate and I walked downhill, backs to the Institute, for a small adventure before we set to work.  The physicist desires to explain the universe in a limited set of mathematical equations, which require a logical structure and repeatability, but such a strict reductionist approach, confining the universe to a box with a pretty bow, is but a few hundred years old and for millennia prior, people still erected buildings and bridges that yet stand, though Newton’s laws were never employed.  Some structures are perhaps not so impressive from our modern view, while others, such as the pyramids or the henges, are miracles though only because we implicitly and unfairly limit the intelligence and ingenuity of our predecessors.  A dome is another wonder, masses on masses that curve and extend over nothing, and as the size of the dome grows so do the lateral forces, until beyond some point where it would collapse, the sides exploding outward and the crown crashing inward.  A simple modern solution would be to provide extra support, trusses underneath or buttresses outside, but both significantly undermine the awe, which is an especially crucial quality if you are contracted to build the world’s largest cathedral.  After the eighth bell’s toll, the small wooden door at the side, under a mosaic of the Annunciation, a genuflecting Gabriel and the dove presenting to Mary, opened and we started the climb up and into Brunelleschi’s cupola.

An excerpt on an essay on my first trip to Florence, Italy, for a two-week workshop.

As the mid-afternoon doldrums hit, we filtered up to the dining room again, and the few that had arrived before us were already deep in lively debate of the politics of one country or another.  This was Italy and this was espresso time, and I joined out of external social pressure rather than a love or need of coffee, which, before this week, I had drank of very little.  The air of the room was heavy with the stench of burnt beans atomized into steam and expelled from the machine into beige plastic demitasse, and I joined the queue, then walked to an open seat bearing the drink and a stick packet of sugar, the only way that I could stomach it.  A whole packet of sugar for one shot of espresso rendered what was in the cup thick and syrupy and I was able, just, to maintain a straight face while I sipped, but needed the strength of all my faculties to do so, and did not engage in the conversation.  Every day I did this, and every day about 30 minutes later, jitters would take over and I would crash, humorous head-on-keyboard style, slumped in my chair for a nap before I could wrest control from this vile drink.  Convinced that this was the fault of the coffee, I swore off the stuff when I returned home, ordering a hot chocolate while my girlfriend ordered a latte, and only minimally engaged with it when I would return to Europe.  Years later, when I had come to adore black, unadulterated pour-over coffee for its therapeutic properties to children screaming at hours of the day I had previously been unaware existed, it finally dawned on me that my issues with Italian espresso had not been the espresso at all, but the sugar.