It takes us a bit less than two hours to drive to Firenze, depending on traffic. While Venice seems to be all soft light and water, Firenze is red tile and stone. I prefer it, if only because it is "our" city. We have our regular parking garage with our regular bakery near it. We have "our" museum -- the Uffizi. We know some restaurants we like and where the English-language bookstore is. (Well, Jonathan knows -- I have no sense of direction at all and have been relying on the boys to navigate in the car ever since they were still strapped in child seats in the back. Even now, we sometimes talk about the time, about five years ago, when we were lost and I suddenly knew where I was. It was glorious! But mostly Jonathan knows where to go and I hold his hand.)

But my favorite place in Firenze is Zecchi, the art supply store.

It is small (smaller than this wide-angle picture makes it look) and crowded with pencils and paints and jars holding brushes of all kinds jammed in together in an only vaguely ordered confusion. There is very little room to move around because beautiful things in tubes and boxes and piles fill all the space.

Behind the tumbled chaos on the counter in the back is a whole wall of jars of powdered pigments -- every color, but heavy on all the gradations of burnt red that are the colors of Tuscany. They seem like the ingredients for magical elixirs and I suppose that in a way they are. 

We went there on Wednesday and I bought more pencils for my drawing class and then we went to the Museo degli Innocenti to see the Escher exhibit, "Italy as Inspiration for the work of M.C. Escher."

We've been saying ever since we moved into the rustic farmhouse that it is like living in an Escher drawing. It turns out that we were more correct than we knew. Escher lived in Italy for 13 years -- he got married in Viareggio, which is so close to us that we go there to get our favorite bread.

His early drawings of landscapes around here are absolutely realistic renderings of the places and look like, well, Escher drawings, with nonsensical stairways and strange contorted perspectives because that is how this place actually is -- defying logic and even gravity. There were photographs paired with the scenes he drew and they are exact matches.

So my big reaction to the show was, "Aha! I knew it!" Like I have somehow caught Italy red-handed in the act.