Man, I love hard work. I could watch it all day.

I’ve actually been to Firenze, many years back. We wandered all over the place, and met all sorts of people, including long-lost relatives who were likely happy to remain lost, and are probably still counting their spoons. The museums are ridiculous. There are finer objets displayed in the lobby of the restroom than in any museum in America. There was no room for it in the regular parts of the museum, jammed with Michelangelos and DaVincis and Titians and that gang.

There are a lot of craftsmen in Florence, of many different kinds. There’s a whole neighborhood filled with guys making stone inlay tables that cost more than space shuttles. Mark Twain extolled their wonders in The Innocents Abroad, the funniest book I ever read. You should get a copy of that book before they bowdlerize it. I assume it’s no longer allowed to call Italians fumigating, macaroni-stuffing organ grinders, so I assume they’ll “fix” it, and the covers of the book will be very close together indeed.

I learned to speak Italian passably well before I went. I listened to Pimsleur tapes while driving, and at the time, I’m sure I looked crazy to other drivers, yelling Italian in an empty car. Of course everyone talks endlessly in empty cars now, worshipping at the temple of the God of Apple, and looking just about as crazy, but you don’t notice it so much.

Speaking the local lingo made lots of bonus points with the denizens of Florence. They’d treat the average tourist as a cash machine, but if you at least parloed with them haltingly they’d treat you like a friend. I met a group of woodworkers, in a barroom, of course, and they wanted to know how we did it in America, so they picked my brain, and I pestered them in return. I managed to tell a joke in Italian, a prodigious effort I can tell you, and everyone laughed, and they damn near adopted me. They all had next to no machinery or tools of any kind, and every man-jack of them was a better woodworker than anyone I’ve ever known. For shiggles they used to make gigantic wooden bolts and nuts. The nuts turned on the threads like they were steel, and made in a factory. They made them with hand tools. If you locked me in a prison cell with a baulk of wood and their tools, and told me I would be released when I managed to make one half as good as theirs, I would immediately make a wooden knife and slash my wrists, to save time.

So I visited (translation: drank grappa) with guys who made picture frames worthy of anything in the Uffizi, and leather goods, and gold jewelry, and every other thing under the sun that no one seems to know how to make anymore outside a factory.

I missed the whole luthier scene though. Maybe they were on the wagon.