It looked like there were people up there. Maybe they’re cleaning it or something, I thought.

How wrong I was.

With a sense of mounting inevitability, we decided to climb to the top of the dome. The first spiral staircase wound up inside the main wall, with little apertures every now and then letting in some pale light from the outside. The stairs exited onto a smallish room somewhere within the walls, then a passageway took us towards the inside of the building and disgorged us onto the lower of the two walkways we’d seen from the floor.

Ye gods. This was high. This was really, really high.

“Good grief!” I said, feeling that stoicism and stiff upper lip were important at altitude. What I really wanted to say was less polite, and somewhat disrespectful inside a church. What I wanted to say was: “Holy fucking shit.”

The balcony projected out from the wall by about two feet and was edged by a stone balustrade. Perspex sheeting had been added in modern times, presumably to prevent those particular idiots who gaily caper around high, exposed areas from accidentally (if gratifyingly) toppling to their doom. We made our way about a quarter of the way around the circumference of the balcony where another door let us back into the friendly darkness of the walls. We kept on climbing, this time up normal staircases, but which began to narrow and curve inwards to the right. We were, in effect, climbing up the inside surface of the dome itself. The stairs eventually turned completely to the right and headed straight towards the summit.

Of course, there was a queue of maybe ten or fifteen people on the final flight of stairs, waiting for some of those up on the lantern to come back down and make room for us, so we had plenty of time to reflect that we were standing on a few feet of brick hanging unsupported by pillar or buttress over a 300 foot drop. The queue cleared, we scaled the ladder and looked out over the red Florentine rooftops. And crapped ourselves anew, because we were just so damn high up.

We took some photographs, ignoring the idiots gaily capering by the weatherbeaten and frankly inadequate iron railings, and walked very carefully around to take in the view. It was quite a sight, even with an overcast morning sky dulling the colours a little. We took a few photographs, climbed back down the ladder and trotted down the stairs with mounting relief until finally a vertical staircase presented itself. Hooray! Even if the dome were to spontaneously crumble and send the lantern tumbling a hundred metres to the cold, hard floor of the nave, we’d probably be okay.

And then another door opened in front of us. This was the higher of the two balconies. There was just something quietly terrifying about our situation, standing on a narrow ledge of stone two hundred feet above the mosaic floor with the dome starting to curve inwards just above our heads. To look up was to be reminded “My God, we were just up there,” and to look down was to think “and now we’re still up here.” We looked at each other, eyes wide, and followed the other visitors out towards the exit, another quarter of the way around but there seemed to be some kind of hold up. What kind of casual psychopath would want to linger up here?

A French one, as it turned out. A guy and a girl were lounging idly against the balustrade, pointing out parts of the fresco lining the dome, and dissecting it in the manner of art history students.

“Bof,” I imagined they were saying, “je pense que c’est assez bien, mais Nôtre Dame est plus belle, n’est-ce pas?” They would have been inhaling Gauloises if they had been allowed to, and louchely dangling a glass of vin rouge or pastis from their free hand. I didn’t actually hear what they were saying, because the mother of an American family in front of us was reminding her terrified daughter to “Breathe honey, breathe,” while they filed past the contemptuous French couple. We followed them along the gallery, back into the stairs within the wall and practically skipped down to ground level.

The exit took us out on the other side of the cathedral. My God, it was good to be alive and at sea level, or at least close enough so that falling there wouldn’t cause us to purée. We must have been giddy from either oxygen deprivation or relief, because the rest of the day was an exercise in holiday joy.

We gawked at Machiavelli, Galileo and Dante in the Uffizi’s arcade of statues; knocked back espressos at the bar of an open-fronted café as the rain thundered down at its heaviest; noticed for the first time the elevated corridor which runs all the way from the Palazzo Vecchio north of the river to the Palazzo Pitti a kilometre away on the south of it, built so the Medici could move between their strongholds without coming into contact with the great unwashed; and lastly saw the tombs of the subjects of the Uffizi’s statuary in the church of Santa Croce, that of Stendhal syndrome fame.

That evening we took the Ponte Vecchio to the Oltrarno, the quarter south of the Arno, and came to rest on the patio of a restaurant in Piazza di Santo Spirito. We ordered a couple of glasses of cheap plonk* and I think visibly slumped into our chairs. The frustrations of the two previous days were gone, and the slightly grotty** piazza felt like a slice of native, modern day Florentine culture rather than a stiffly preserved renaissance artefact. It’d taken until the last day, but we’d finally arrived! We ate well (as we had done the whole time), sat on the steps of the church with a can of vending-machine beer†, drank deeply and watched the square’s residents promenade slowly around, calling up to their neighbours smoking at the windows of their apartments.

We walked slowly home. Next morning we caught the train to Pisa from the fantastic modernist train station. Oh come on, you didn’t think I’d pass up the chance to throw in a casual mention of a ’30s concrete masterpiece with the grotesque distinction of having been rubber-stamped by Mussolini, did you?

* Italy does good coffee and as far as my limited palate can tell, good wine. Drink coffee at the bar like an Italian or settle for the house plonk and you can get stimulated/relaxed on the cheap. Nice!

** Piazza S. Spirito is apparently a hang out of the “heroin set”, but I can’t decide if the New York Times means decadent, elegantly wasted artist types or your more typical Leith resident. Either way, there were a fair few slightly absent-looking people about, and I noticed in general that a lot of the city (at least what we saw of it) was just a little frayed around the edges, almost like Venice. Is this an Italian thing, or is it just that the rough patches are obvious when compared to the shiny tourist attractions?

† Now there’s a blast from the past! Beer vending machines—still awesome.

We’d taken a cheap-before-taxes Ryanair flight out of Prestwick and had killed the inevitable delay between check-in and boarding with a bacon roll and an orange juice in the departure lounge. The cabin doors opened in Pisa to admit the furnace-like Tuscan air and deliver us from the awful Euro-pop piped into the cabin exhorting us to “fly-fly Ryanair”, and my downfall began the instant the blazing sun smote my sweaty brow. We trudged through Pisa’s graffiti-covered streets* to dispatch the leaning tower with a few clicks of the camera shutter and then caught the next train to Florence. Either the bacon roll or its piratical £4 price tag was stuck in my craw, and whichever one it was was making me feel pretty rough. I drank a bottle of mineral water, closed my eyes and hoped for the best. I slept through the hour-long journey.

Of course, this being a holiday and the very last thing we needed was for me to be feeling dreadful and reminding Ash of this fact every few minutes, I continued to feel dreadful and reminded Ash of this fact every few minutes once we’d checked in to our pensione and taken to the cobbled streets of Florence.

We wandered around for a while, surprised by the niggling street perfume and dodging scooters and tricyle vans with blaring horns. I know this is a cliché, but Italian drivers really are utterly without fear or the instinct of self-preservation. Little Piaggios, Hondas and Yamahas would charge into spaces barely wide enough for a pedestrian (often between two moving cars), stop for an instant while their rider lit a cigarette, ciao bella-d into their mobile phone or disinterestedly inspected the garb of this or that member of the opposite sex, who would almost certainly be lighting a cigarette of their own or ciao bello-ing into their own mobile, and then charge off again into the next fleeting gap in a cloud of blue smoke. We threaded our way through this two-stroke mayhem to the Duomo while I wobbled slightly at the unexpected, faintly unpleasant smell. We gazed Stendhal-like at the cathedral’s intricate façade, found a tourist-trap pizzeria and ate a meal ill-tempered by my whining.

The small amount of food I’d been able to eat must have helped to sort me out (that, and the litre of water I quaffed while Ash demurely sipped at her wine) and by the time we made our way back to the hotel I was feeling almost human. We stopped at an intersection, perched on the stone lip edging a grand palazzo and watched the Florentines and their visitors go past by foot, scooter and car. I felt much better, and considerably under-dressed, after half an hour of idle people-watching, and we called it a night.

* * *

The next morning we went straight to the Accademia to check out Michaelangelo’s David, bearer of the most famous renaissance arse in the world. It was overcast and a bit muggy but entirely bearable compared to the day before. I was a much happier camper. In a fit of responsible pedantry I’d pre-booked tickets online so we sailed past the enormous queue of unfortunates waiting to purchase their own and straight into a slightly smaller one for those who already had. We passed through an airport-style security checkpoint (for the second time in two days I was disappointed that my arm didn’t cause alarms to go off) into the gallery, and wandered into the main hall.

The statue of David is clearly the main attraction here. We took up our places with the others in the admiring circle around him, at what we thought was roughly the right distance—apparently, Michaelangelo deliberately distorted the proportions of the statue so as to appear correct from a particular viewing distance—and considered it.

Being a bit of a literal, scientific type, I thought the proportions were just a bit wrong. Maybe I’m ultra-philistine or just narrow minded, but I didn’t really get what Michaelangelo intended to do; was he really aiming for some kind of forced perspective correct only from a certain angle and distance? Apart from some slightly odd proportions (“What’s wrong with his hand?”), the rest of the statue looked perfectly normal—perfectly incredible, really, in some of the details—but any sort of cunning grand design to fool the viewer’s eye was lost on me.

Stomachs rumbling we found a little café for some breakfast, sharing the seats with an English family. “Gracias señor,” the dad said to the waiter, “gracias.”

We spent the rest of the day getting so lost that we came to a road sign telling us we were about to leave Florence, found the church of San Miniato al Monte about two hours and six miles later than we’d expected, dazedly took in the view and went home for an extended siesta.

(To be continued! I moan far less in the second part, honest.)

* The sheer amount of graffiti in Pisa and Florence was astonishing. Elaborate spray-painted tags lined the railways, along with some political stuff declaiming against GM food, George Bush or whatever; and wherever a queue formed in any historical building outside the sight of an attendant, the walls would be covered with scratched-out signatures and dates. Thank you, Cindy from Atlanta, for letting us know you saw the Duomo in June 1997.

* * *

A couple of days earlier, the morning we were due to take the ferry from Pula to Venice, the ship was conspicious by its absence. A company rep arrived instead and told us that the Adriatic – doing its best millpond impression at that point – was too rough. They’d drive us to Venice by bus.

Five and a half dehydrated, hungry hours later and the best thing I could say about the journey was at least we could tick off Slovenia. We tumbled off the bus at Tronchetto, Venice’s ferry port, found an ATM to load up on euros and headed for the most likely looking water bus stop. We wobbled aboard the vaporetto and sat back for our first, slightly proletarian, trip along the Grand Canal.

It is exactly as you imagine. Dashing water taxis weave between vaporettos and barges; baroque palaces sit right on the water, their front doors opening onto private docks or even the water itself; barber-striped mooring poles cluster along the banks and every scrap of dry land is utterly heaving with tourists.

The vaporetto stopped just past the Rialto bridge and we were plunged straight into the morass of bodies between us and the hostel. We got there, inspected the mosquito-encrusted walls with furrowed brows and headed out to get our bearings. We made it as far as the Campo San Polo, eating a doughy slice of steaming takeaway pizza along the way. The bus trip had taken it out of both of us (odd how sitting still for so long will do that) so we found our way back to swat a few mossies and pass an otherwise uneventful night.

The second of the Bs in B&B Rota turned out to be a cup of coffee and a lucky dip pastry from a Chinese café next to the hostel. This was our designated Obnoxious Tourist day, so we joined the other visitors inexorably pushing Piazza San Marco into the lagoon by taking in the Basilica and ogling the rest of the square’s architecture. (Standing in line for the Basilica, my phone rang and I spent about a quarter of an hour and a fortune in roaming charges making an offer for a flat that was rejected a couple of hours later.) We dutifully shot a few photos of the Doge’s Palace and Bridge of Sighs, then repaired to a streetside café in which we got drunk as only tourists on an island free of motor vehicles can.

That night we went for dinner at 6, and paid the karmic price for it.

* * *

The following day, I had a grand plan for us to take the water bus out to the cimitero on San Michele to check out the real state of death in Venice, but although we took the correct boat it happened to be going in the opposite direction. There followed an impromptu tour of the south-eastern tip of the city, passing by the Bond-villainous bulk of the Maltese Falcon berthed behind a prole-resistance cordon and finally ending rather anticlimactically back at Piazza San Marco.

We wandered around the Accademia area for a while, and I decided to tick off another box by visiting the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. I took in the Picassos, Magrittes and Dalis and emerged exactly as hopelessly philistine as when I’d gone in. I got more aesthetic joy out of reading The Elements of Typography over the last couple of weeks than I did out of my first Guggenheim museum, so I may well be doomed to forever under-appreciate modern art.

For our last night we walked over to Campo Santa Margherita in the Dorsoduro area. We had a couple of drinks outside as the light faded, moved over to a restaurant and stuffed ourselves with the sort of bog standard Italian food that tastes fantastic even though it’s basically just tomatoes and pasta. The dull tourist roar had been replaced by a pleasant local buzz, and it was a nice way to round off the trip.

It may sound a bit anticlimactic, but for a city quite so alluring to authors, artists and tourists alike, I can’t really recall any great ephiphany or occurence that suddenly opened my eyes to its appeal. What happened instead was that over the few days we were there, the place sort of seeped into my mind so that by the time we left it seemed to embody the archetypal European city. It’s ludicrously grand, with church after church of Renaissance friezes and burnished gold fittings; literal palaces are everywhere and even the most humble apartment building is warped with age and history. Then, to a greater or lesser degree, there is a universal patina of decay – if a building isn’t visibly leaning or fringed with lichen or exposed brickwork, another creeping inundation is only ever a few months away to help it on its way.

Venice is old Europe to a tee: grandeur, decay, culture, history, fashion and caffeine-heavy breakfasts in one handy package.

* In other news, the internet is now so bloated that it contains reviews of town squares.