It can say a lot to harbor a home full of Ikea versus Kmart, and in this society, the act of possession is 90% of the identity. So, you will understand that standing in front of a hundred artificial David replicas, poor Pietas, and enough Venuses (Venii?) to populate an entire solar system that I am completely underwhelmed.

The first thing you learn as a tourist is that if it is a piece of recreated Italian history, it will be available on carts as frequently as I can find a Dunkin Donut (Starbucks, for you West Coasters). Every major city and tourist attraction is teeming with them, and their overabundant proliferation can lead to one simple conclusion: Someone must buy these things.

There is a home in America (and several other countries) that has placed this shoddy albino replica of David on the mantel and told stories of standing underneath his great winkie in the Academe.

To tell you the truth, his winkie and his structure are something to behold. He is the main attraction (along with the famous Venus in a Half Shell painting) at the Academe - and in this domed spotlight, you will actually understand why. It isn’t like Monets or Picassos that simply increase their vibrance in person (our society has reproduced versions of them everywhere so the real thing always looks like a…like a reproduction which prompts the question of whether we would ever know a real thing if we saw it.).

Seeing David was sorta impactful. Larger than life, his proportions are flawless and for the first time, I am given the insight that David is THE David from those old Goliath stories. I never made the connection. I thought he was a stable boy or a volunteer model that we thought was so neat-o. But with his sling over his shoulder, he is the triumphant David, himself a reproduction of the glory felt by Florence over its many enemies.

And, of course, no pictures. But you can buy them. Or the plaster figurines.

I did go shopping in Florence. This amazing city can’t help but inspire you to purchase things. There are its world-reknowned leather markets and amazing museums. You are taken in by the street vendors and shops. This was a city whose livelihood was founded in mercantilism - and unlike Rome where the stores seemed generic, they are more fascinating here.

I found clocks that are designed by the owner and bought four. I found paper masks that are made by the owner and bought one for me and one for my niece. I bought a leather jacket. I bought steel-toed boots. I was a haggard, bagcarrying mess by the end of my shopping experience. It was beautiful.

You find it hard to take it all in, but as I am sitting with a local boy named Leonardo that would eventually take us to the plaza that overlooks the entire city so we could wonder aloud like all the other photo-taking, t-shirt wearing tourists, we embark on a discussion of what makes these things so fascinating for Americans.

He is bored with it, and Florence is not the big city of Rome or the metropolitan trend-laiden market of Milan. It is a smaller town that was the hub of culture during the Rennaisance - and living here yields the occasional fun event, but years of tourists coming and going and the same old art all the time. He wanted to see modern art, but that is not what Florence does. They specialize in the past.

Leo is a future for Florence, bright and schooling in Siena (he filled me on the dir about that town), and he helps me carry my bags when I meet him with all my shopping at the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge covered in shops and houses that is the picture point for most tourists. Like David, it IS Florence in all her strange and playful wonder.

My theory about vacation spots comes crystal standing there waiting for Leonardo to meet me. I have taken innumerable shots of people’s underwear hanging from windows, old weather buildings that might be unsafe for human entrance, and gawked at even the most mundane thing because this is Italy. Who do those underwear belong to? Do they know that families all over the world point at their underclothes and wax romantic about their own travels and ignore the journeys of the clothes that they point to? In a tourist town - do we reproduce the experience so much for the sake of the ‘experience’ that we not only pay for an illusion but instead, we become part of it. A necessary carrier of myths in the form of plaster penised Davids.