The last birthday

It dawned on us that night that we were due home in exactly one month. How could 48 weeks have gone so quickly? How quickly would the next 4 weeks go? Sobering thought.

On our way out of Florence we stopped at Vinci, birthplace of old Leo. Having visited a museum with models made from his madly ingenious sketches and notepads, it becomes all too clear he was a time traveller. How can a Renaissance man have envisaged a working tank, a bicycle that wouldn’t look out of place today, a snorkel and thousands more incredible machines, oh – and squeezed in the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, or as our son calls it “some blokes having their tea”? Utter obsessive genius, and the kids were highly impressed.

And so to Pisa, seaside neighbour of Florence, home of the leaning tower. Had to be done, really. The leaning tower, despite being on every image of Italy, has to be seen to be believed. It’s smaller than I thought, and well, it’s just completely pissed! The story of its construction and all the attempts to stop it falling over are almost comical. We loved the fact no one admitted to have built the first three storeys. Alas the smaller two aren’t allowed up, but Joe and Rowan did it justice at sunset, and we did all the requisite photos and walking around it. The whole piazza, not just the tower, is beautiful. Unfortunately we found the seedier side of Pisa too – around the railway station and in underpasses were piles of used needles. Having to pick your and your kids way through that in sandals was pretty horrifying.

We used Pisa as a base to go back to Florence to stuff the kids’ heads with art and sculpture, spending a day ‘doing’ the Uffizi and the Accademia. Booking in advance reduces the queue from about 3 hours to only ½ an hour, and then you can stroll around the Medici palace gazing at endless (we do mean endless) Renaissance art. Having been before and utterly embarrassed ourselves looking for Michelangelo’s David for several hours (he’s in the Accademia) we knew to circumvent certain rooms and stick with the biggies. So, the kids saw Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Cannaletto’s, Raphael’s, Michelangelo’s and Titian’s, the incomplete Da Vinci’s and the Rembrandt self portraits but avoided a lot of the rest. The Accademia is a lot quicker, because there’s only really one bit worth looking at. Yup, the David and Michelangelo’s unfinished and huge slave sculptures. These were incredible, literally looking like they’re struggling to be born out of the massive lumps of rock from which they are partially carved. The David itself is, well, it’s the David. It’s better from a distance as you don’t notice his overly huge hands and gangly arms, nor the wall eyes. But this is apparently deliberate: he was meant to be seen from afar. We posed infront of him and an officious attendant came straight up and berated Joe for wielding a camera. “Show some respect” she scolded, “and teach your kids something”. Given more time and energy, we might have argued that it is just a lump of old stone, and non-flash photography is not going to hurt it. We also might have told her about our year of attempting to teach the kids rather a lot, actually, but pedantic small-mindedness probably just comes with her frustrating job.

Jenna has just turned five and she’s travelled over five continents, snorkelled the Great Barrier Reef, seen Quechua women weaving, visited a floating reed island home, seen Mycenae, Pompeii, Macchu Picchu, the Colosseum, the Great Wall and Yosemite, spent time with Amazonian and Mongolian families and seen some of the rarest animals in the wild. She has learnt to swim, to write, to be polite and introduce herself in Spanish and Mandarin, she can tell you how many watts are in a kilowatt but hey – we really should try and teach our kids something, someday.