Pitti Palace

 

Hi Koko,

Last night we were having a strange conversation. I was scrolling through old photographs of vacations and you suddenly said, “I have been to these places, but I don’t remember.” I can see that dejected and languishing look on your face. 

And I thought to myself, your excuse is that you were too young, what is my excuse for having these memories lost? So I will try to think back and write to you some memories which are unique to us when we visited these places. I am not going to go all Lonely Planet on you and explain which flight we took and what famous sights we saw, but I will be talking more about what made our trip to these places special. We made distinct and once-in-a-life-time experiences here. Maybe, some day, when things are better and we can freely move about again, we will go to distant lands again – to make new memories. Till then, let me regale you about the old ones. 

Let me start with one particular experience in the last awesome trip that we took to Italy in February 2019. Your father and I had done all the homework, read up our travel literature, blogs, watched the YouTube videos, dusted our art history and what not; but nothing could prepare us for the sheer delight that was Italy. The February sun, crowded places (sigh!), queues in the museums, old palaces – it was just splendid. We had also made it a point to read Dan Brown’s Inferno, because, what’s a trip without retracing the steps of Robert Langdon, if you can?

We were in Florence, having our favorite cuisine, and seeing our favorite art in flesh and blood (almost), when I chanced upon this rather curious name for a palace – Pitti Palace or Palazzo Pitti. It so happens that there was a very influential Florentine banker by the name of Luca Pitti who lived here. It was later on bought by the Medici family and is currently the largest museum in Florence, a city with many museums. The palace is huge, literally palatial. We could not see it in entirety in one day. It is situated beside the river Arno and there is a beautiful spot of landscaping right in front of the palace, where people can just sit around and have a picnic.

Now while there is nothing particularly striking about the name to an average Joe, the word “Pitti” actually has a connotation in Bangla and it means a sound beating. Leading up to the trip to the famed palace I was having this little game with you where I would tell you that Pitti Palace is where bad boys are given a sound beating. The smart cookie that you are, once you were there and were quite comfortable with the idea that I had obviously made up this ruse to mess with you, you posed the innocent question, “I don’t see anyone getting a beating.” So we ran about the courtyard of the palace housing the Raphaels and Botticellis for some “Pitti” time.

Your Baba also took a picture of us, see. 

Love,

Ma