What IS that smell?

Yesterday we went to the Mercato Centrale to pick up fresh veggies and bread for a pasta dinner at home. It's a great open market with to-die-for produce, meats, cheeses and oils. Our prize find was giant fresh porcini mushrooms. The night before we'd had a marginal meal after visiting every known book shop looking for the Michelin Green Guide on Florence, in English. They have hundreds in Italian but, go figure, none in the language most of the tourists here speak. Not because they're sold out; they just don't have them, and we could only imagine how we could butcher a translation from Italian on 15th century oil panels in the Brancacci Chapel. Anyway, dinner at home yesterday sounded really good and we were dying to try those hurkin' fresh porcinis. Has anybody ever seen a fresh one? They're WAY bigger than the mushrooms that used to grow on our bathroom carpet as kids. Later in the afternoon we headed back up to Piazza della Republica to meet our friend Adri and deliver gifts from Boise. We spoke mostly Italian with her for over two hours and she laughed when we thought she should so we're pretty sure we didn't sound like idiots. She treated us to lunch and invited us to dinner at her place next week so that's a good sign, right? Back to those mushrooms. Use the dried ones. We're pretty sure the bathroom mushrooms would have been better. But the pasta was great and the chianti delicious so all in all a good day. Today we wandered through Santo Spirito, San Frediano and Santa Carmine churches and down to the 12th century city gates. When we got back to the apartment Tam's nose went into overdrive. It's either the mushrooms or the Tallegio cheese. More air freshener tomorrow.