Day 4 Travelers Through the Ages Tour Italy 2025

I love the bus days on these trips. They’re days when we have a lot of ground to cover (today driving from Como to Florence), and they’re a time for S.E.’s, sleeping, and eating sugary delights at rest stops. I always seem to be rejuvenated by bus days.

It’s even better when there’s some kind of delay, because it means more consistent out-of-the-body time without interruption. Today we got a late start due to some hotel checkout snafus and I heard, through the veil of dreams and misty, head-nodding spiritual travel, something about missing some kind of stop to see a “giant.” Did I dream that or did they really announce it? Was it a real giant? An Italian giant? Myth and dream and reality got all jumbled up. John joked that Goliath had already been defeated so we didn’t have to go. What did that mean? It sort of made sense and sort of didn’t, like most dream jokes.

We stopped for lunch at a relaxed, family-style farm/restaurant in Parma (home of Parmesan cheese) that was so relaxed that courses got delayed and jumbled up as well. Our table ended up having cheese, then dessert, then steak/chicken/potatoes purloined from other tables. It was fine with me. I just ate ice cream at the next rest stop.

There is a large herd of dairy cows. The farm creates (nurtures? ferments?) Parmesan cheese, which arrived at our table in samples that were aged 20, 30 and 100 months. The older cheeses had more flavor and greater complexity. The fog of language differences led some people to say that the cheeses were 20, 30 and 100 YEARS old. Is it possible to have 100 year old cheese? That can’t be true. I doze off to the lullaby-hum of the bus engine wondering if giants would eat 100 year old cheese, because they both need long periods of time in which to grow or age. Would a giant, whose growth is sped up through time, eat a 100 year old cheese, whose growth has been enhanced BY time, and would they recognize each other as fellow time travelers? These questions float through my dozing consciousness, settling through levels of air like dust particles glimmering in the sunlight. My eyes briefly open to see John dozing as well.

We arrive in Florence near sunset. It’s a descent from transcendental Lake Como into a more pragmatic and creative energy. I’m all atingle with the art vibe. It’s not just in the paintings and sculpture, it’s in the air. I was so happy here in another life. I still feel it. Art was a portal through the third eye and into the heavens.

That energy is still here, even though crowds of tourists seem like they might debase it—but they can’t. They are all still stimulated by it. There are places on the planet that are healing centers or spas. Florence is a kind of healing center that’s also grounded. It’s not a rest stop but a movement stop, more invigorating than relaxing. I feel a sense of unlimited creative power here, as though I could do anything artistically and I’d have the force of centuries of creative masters at my back. I wander through the streets at dusk feeling like I’m wearing an artist-superman cape, and the art in the Uffizi is radiating an energy that buzzes through the whole town.