Not a lot for Florence today - just browsing. Virginia Ann looked for jewelry in Angela Caputi , gifts in Il Papiro , and more jewelry in linea Punto Ro . And another grand adventure - renting a car in Italy. This was the only event requiring human contact while planning the trip and it was worth it - all the guides said to rent the car from the US and I used Anne Tucker from Travel Wizard - a group specializing in Italy - who I found on the Internet (800 949-0630 #110). She booked us with Europcar and the three-day rental was $150.
Now in Italy things were not so efficient. Everything - I mean everything - closes around 1300 (1:00 pm) until 1430 or 1500. This is extended to tourist offices and car rental agencies. We were executing against a carefully architected timetable and arrived at the car rental offices at 1330 to discover they closed from 1300 to 1430. We were expected in Bologna for the next event at 1630 (I thought) so we were forced to drive like Italians - fast.
Off to Bologna....
Cal originally thought that the tour of the Ducati Factory was at 1630 so driving like Italians paid off and we were in time for the 1600 tour. The tour was great it is fun to see the birthplace of your motorcycle! The Ducati factory was built in 1935 and destroyed in 1944 by aerial bombardment (careful not to say whose bombs) and rebuilt in 1946 - when the Italian government requested that they change the business from electronics components to something else - they chose motorcycles. Currently producing about 200 bikes a day - it is a very labor-intensive process.
Above left the cylinders for the engine are stacked up prior to polishing. They lose about 1/3 of their weight once finished. In the middle a worker assembles the engine - each engine is assigned to a single person and they are responsible for assembling the parts and putting them together. After the engine assembly the bikes are assembled on a line with each worker specializing in a specific component. We were able to view the door to the R&D/Racing department - but not allowed inside. The 50 individuals working in R&D use badges to gain access.
After the factory tour we went to the Duacti Museum. The Ducati Museum
traces the steps of Ducati racing history. The great moments of the Ducati
past are recounted using a variety of Ducati images, motorcycles, and
memorabilia. The effect is the recreation of over fifty years of motorcycle
lore.
The museum reiterates the chronology of Ducati's evolution from a small
electrical company to a motorcycling giant.
The story begins in 1946 with the Cucciolo, Ducati's first engine. Up
to this point, the company, which was founded in 1926 by the Cavalieri
Ducati brothers, had concentrated on the manufacturing of electro-mechanical
devices.
The Ducati Museum offers visitors a unique way of following the Ducati story. The bikes have been placed in chronological order along a circular, luminous "racetrack".
Adjacent to the track is a set of thematically organized rooms which provide more detailed information on each of the Museum's sections. As well as containing display panels that describe the most representative models, each room tells a part of the Ducati story in greater detail.
This is the last section with racing bikes since the '90s that has won superbike championships.
These are the race bikes whose technology was used in building Cal's own Raquel.
Off to San Gimignano - well not quite so fast. There was some sort of traffic problem that we never saw, which turned the one-hour trip from Bologna to Florence into a three and a half hour experience and we straggled into San Gimignano well after 2100 - a bottle of local Chianti and off to bed.