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Jeremy's Next Project - I'm Not Lost, I'm Here!


cachew nut

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Sheesh, tha't even a bigger mess than this system we encountered on a recent visit to Florence.

 

Florence's address system has a split personality. Private homes, some offices, and hotels are numbered in black (or blue), while businesses, shops, and restaurants are numbered independently in red. This means that 1, 2, 3 (black) addresses march up the block numerically oblivious to their 1r, 2r, 3r (red) neighbors. You might find the doorways on one side of a street numbered: 1r, 2r, 3r, 1, 4r, 2, 3, 5r . . .

 

Florence keeps proclaiming that it's busily renumbering the whole city without the color system -- plain 1, 3, 5 on one side, 2, 4, 6 on the other -- and will release the new standard soon, but no one is quite sure when. Conservative Florentines who don't want their addresses to change have been helping to hold up the process. This is all compounded by the fact that the color codes occur only in the centro storico and other older sections of town; outlying districts didn't bother with the codes and use the international standard system common in the United States.

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I worked in Caracas, VE for a while. The centre square mile or so of the city doesn't have numbers. Addresses read like: The Banco del Caribe building near the intersection of Simon Bolivar and Colombo, or "fouth black door south of Espagna on Liberacion"

 

Surprisingly, FedEx can deliver to these sorts of addresses.

 

The newer parts of Caracas (i.e. most of the city) have normalish addresses.

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Albania is classified as "an emerging democracy." It must be difficult to verify registered voters.

 

But the country is only about the size of Maryland, so why not give everybody the same address, kind of like a dormitory. Shouldn't be too hard to sort it out. ;)

we talking albania or alabama here?

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Sheesh, tha't even a bigger mess than this system we encountered on a recent visit to Florence.

 

Florence's address system has a split personality. Private homes, some offices, and hotels are numbered in black (or blue), while businesses, shops, and restaurants are numbered independently in red. This means that 1, 2, 3 (black) addresses march up the block numerically oblivious to their 1r, 2r, 3r (red) neighbors. You might find the doorways on one side of a street numbered: 1r, 2r, 3r, 1, 4r, 2, 3, 5r . . .

 

Florence keeps proclaiming that it's busily renumbering the whole city without the color system -- plain 1, 3, 5 on one side, 2, 4, 6 on the other -- and will release the new standard soon, but no one is quite sure when. Conservative Florentines who don't want their addresses to change have been helping to hold up the process. This is all compounded by the fact that the color codes occur only in the centro storico and other older sections of town; outlying districts didn't bother with the codes and use the international standard system common in the United States.

Yep, I remember that color thing about Florence. In Venice, the same street seemed to change names at every block. Luckily, the maps showed church squares every few blocks, so when you came into a square you would compare the name of the church to the map and adjust your trip accordingly. I'm not sure how the addressing worked in Venice, but getting around with the right map wasn't too bad.

Edited by cachew nut
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