What I did on my holidays

Pisa is a haven of independent shops, only a Vodaphone and a 3 shop showed any signs of franchising or chains. Like the rest of Europe, demarcation between shop types is carefully managed. A tobacconist will not sell sweets nor newspapers, sweets are sold in sweet shops, air compressors are sold in air compressor shops, utensils for hobby-craft are sold in a 'Utensilaria'. Newspapers, of course, are sold from huts that sit in the streets shuttered at night, taunting you with back issues of 'Dylan Dog'. Come dawn these huts transform into huge pavement newsagents, staffed by little old ladies and selling copies of niche publications across the foreign language spectrum. I counted no less than three Italian magazines dedicated to the joy of watches, and niche indeed is the Ill Duce Calendar 2009.

From the spread and density of 'Fotocopiarias' the need to duplicate pieces of paper in Pisa is a pressing one. Almost every side street has a tiny boutique offering photocopying and very little else. There was even a photocopying service on a train station platform. I can only assume Italians are forever wandering about desperate to have more copies of everything. I can just imagine an Italian tourist in Birmingham, wandering round going "where the hell do these people photocopy stuff? Damn I need to have more than one copy of this sheet of paper". In Italian obviously.

The Tuscan area doesn't seem to have got the internet bug yet, maybe necessitating all this photocopying - are the locals blogging by writing their diaries, duplicating and then handing round to people in the street? They're certainly out on the streets a lot (there were endless protests relating to a teachers' strike while we were there), which is no surprise as Italian TV seems to be one constant rolling panel show on all the channels, all the time. I did see a stand up comedy show were the mustachioed comic was doing a Sienfeld-eque "Life huh? What's that all about?" routine - it was about how kids had it different these days, playstations were mentioned, and not one of the live audience cracked a smile. The Italian Jimmy Carr it seems.

Michelangelo's David in the Academia gallery in Florence is stunning and much bigger than expected, huge hands - he would have made a fantastic goalkeeper, but the rest of the gallery is pretty much filler. Plaster renderings of statues that might have been made for Scottish gardens, plus a few old musical instruments. Much better is the Uffizi (famously home to Bottichelli's Birth of Venus) where the works are arranged chronologically from the European Gothic (the religious paintings that can't do perspective) through to the Renaissance stuff. The overarching theme is the baby jebus, he's adored by all sorts (all who look suspiciously Western-European) but even though techniques improve over the years no-one gets the face right. JC looks like a kid who's had an old blokes face grafted onto him. Forget improvements in brush technique, or the dawning realisation that things further away got smaller to the eye, hundreds of years of arts could have been improved by giving them a real baby to look at.

The most strange sight we saw in Italy wasn't a sculpture, it was a vegetable. Despite my Latin O-level, finding anything on a menu in Italy that I - as a fussy vegetarian - could eat was impossible without asking for more details. Once pasta sauce contained "cream of pumpings". "Pumpkins?" we asked, "No, pumpings" and we were shown this:

We've christened it Pac Man Ghost fruit. I had pesto.