If you haven't been to Florence, I suggest you find a way to go. Ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby.
But I am really not the person to talk to about Florence. I loved the place, and I'd love a chance to go back and explore it at more leisure. But it was Marjorie who really was blown away by it. Why? Because in her freshman year at Radcliffe, she took a course called Art and Thought in the Renaissance, and for her it was like watching that course literally come alive. You'll understand more when we get to the Bargello later on.
We were late into Livorno, which is the port for Florence and all Tuscany; when we awoke, we were still not docked; indeed, we were still eating breakfast when the ship finally came to rest. When we went down to the Princess Theater to meet our tour, we were told to come back in fifteen minutes. Of all the days to have the ship's uncertain schedule cut into our time on shore.
We had a guide named Laila, who said her name was Arabic for night. Then admitted it was also Hebrew for night. Unlike Margot, Laila spoke excellent idiomatic English without much accent. We later learned she had spent a lot of time living in Atlanta. Laila would not be our guide for Florence; for that, she explained, you needed to have a special badge. She had the badge for Pisa, but not Florence. Apparently, it takes 800 hours of study for the Florence badge.
On the way, she pointed out the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which we could barely see far off in the distance.
She didn't point out things like this aqueduct. Aqueducts, hilltowns surrounded by walls, beautiful churches, not worth mentioning. They are like Crusader castles in Northern Israel. I should have brought a copy of The Innocents Abroad.
You don't drive into Florence. You get let out on the outskirts of the old town and walk. Our "real" guide, Stefania, who also spoke excellent English and had a good sense of humor, joined us there.
Our first stop in Florence was the Piazza San Marco, home of one of the earliest Medici palaces. I'm sure that we wouldn't have even noticed it if it had come later in the tour.
As you can see, though, it was a beautiful day. Cool and uncrowded, it was the perfect time to see Florence.
Here are the three main sites of Florence, so I can get past them.
First, the Duomo.
That is the famous Brunelleschi's Dome, which they still can't duplicate. The Duomo is unreal in its gorgeousness. Other than the scaffolding and the roof, that's all marble.
Second, the Signoria.
That's the fake David, the real one being in the Accademia. We didn't see the real David. But the point is that David was created by Michaelangelo for the express purpose of sitting in the Piazza della Signoria, the main square of Florence, to show the world that Florence was like David, the seemingly weak which by cunning would overcome the strong. For that, you stick in the public square. Sticking it in a museum is like sticking the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. It doesn't say anything about Athens to have the Elgin Marbles in London and having David in the Accademia is not much different from allowing David to sit in, say, the Milwaukee Art Museum. At least it's closer to that, in at least our opinion, than it is to having it sit in the Piazza della Signora where it belongs. I understand about theft and I understand about pollution, and I understand about copies and all that. I guess all I'm saying is we were satisfied with the fake David.
Finally, the church of Santa Croce.
The cool thing about Santa Croce, to us, was the Mogen David over the main rose window. That's there, Stefania explained, because the artist who designed it was Jewish.
Okay, now to the Florence we encountered.
First, the Baptistry of the Duomo, the building next to it, contains doors depicting Old Testament scenes that were the subject of a furious competition between Ghiberti and Brunelleschi. Ghiberti won (Brunelleschi got a decent contract out of it, too, of course). This competition, and Ghiberti's victory in it, Marjorie says, was a key moment in Renaissance art, because Ghiberti's designs were modern and accurate. Here's the doors.
Stefania told us that the figure on the left in this detail is considered a self-portrait of Ghiberti.
Cool guy.
We walked down the front of the Uffizi Gallery. We had tried, in Rome, to get tickets to the Uffizi, but they had to be processed for a longer time than there was between when we tried to get them online and when we were arriving in Florence. As a result, we were expecting not to get to the Uffizi at all. But as we passed, Stefania said that there would be no lines today. So we changed our plans.
In front of the Uffizi are statues of the great persons of Florence. Three of them are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but there is no Raphael. So I combined four of the images we saw into this modern-day set of turtles.
From left to right, Donatello, Michaelangelo, Blackadder and Leonardo.
We crossed to the street where the Ponte Vecchio is located, and there was a t-shirt seller whose copyright infringement looked so obvious to me I took this shot.
Since we represent the Belushi estate, I can now deduct the entire trip. Thanks, t-shirt seller!
After that, we walked by the Museum of the History of Science, whose sign I photographed as a shout-out to our friend Sara. Hi, Sara, I'm pretty sure you told us about this museum, but there really wasn't time.
Near Santa Croce was a lovely Christmas market, something we have since encountered in Genoa and Monte Carlo as well. There were some really lovely booths selling interesting, though not Italian, wares.
And there was a spice store, hurrah!
We bought panini on the Piazza della Signoria and ate while looking at the statuary. I love this shot of the Rape of the Sabine Women, which, as Stefania had pointed out, doesn't have a front or a back to it, which makes it unusual among sculptures of any period. You can look at it with interest at any point.
From there we went to the Bargello, which is the Italian national sculpture museum. It contains two things that Marjorie essentially said were why she wanted to come to Florence, the competition pieces by Ghiberti and Brunelleschi (described above) and David by Donatello. We got to the Bargello and the guy at the gate was discouraging people from coming in. "Come back tomorrow, we're only open another 35 minutes." We explained that we couldn't come back tomorrow, we'd be gone from Florence by tomorrow. So for eight euros between us, we had 35 minutes in the museum. Marjorie loved the two pieces, especially since the David was actually lying on its side being fixed in plain view. You could see how the bronze looked on the bottom, and you could see its base without the statue.
Unfortunately, we couldn't photograph inside the Bargello (not sure why, sculptures don't tend to fade from photography), so no pictures of those. I had a nice shot of this serpent in the museum's courtyard, where photography is allowed.
At this point, Marjorie said, "Dayenu." We had seen the things she really wanted to come to Florence to see. I took this shot of her a little earlier, but she sure looks satisfied, doesn't she?
Overwhelmed, too, I think.
As satisfied as she was, though, we next walked right into the Uffizi. Which is like, I think having your sundae with whipped cream from a really good dairy as well as Dilletante chocolate and caramel sauce, as well as really good ice cream from, say, the place I'll tell you about later.
You can't take pictures of the Uffizi paintings, either, of course, and for good reason. But you're sitting there in this gallery that goes on and on and on and there are sculptures from antiquity just hanging in the halls for decoration that are easily as good as anything in the Louvre, and there are little paintings next to, say, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, that just totally blow you away, and it's a lot to process all at once.
Let me say this: seeing some of these paintings in real life, particularly Venus on the Half-Shell and Leonardo's cartoon of the Annunciation, showed how inadequate reproduction can be. There are things you see in the paint that just don't turn into print properly.
I did take one photo in the Uffizi, of the Ponte Vecchio from above. The two are so integrated that sneaking this picture just seemed right.
That gallery going from one to the other was designed by Varari and allowed the Medici to cross the Arno without going outside.
From the Uffizi, we actually crossed the Ponte Vecchio and ended up on the other side of the Arno, at the Pitti Palace. We didn't go in; they are fixing it.
There were some amazing luxury goods for sale on the Ponte Vecchio.
What we bought, or what Marjorie bought, was a tiny Pinocchio for me. Pinocchio was written by Carlo Collodi, who came from a town we passed on the way to Florence, and he is considered a symbol of Tuscany.
That's him in our stateroom after she gave him to me. I insisted on green, making the shopkeeper open the front window to retrieve him.
We stopped for ice cream, which was the best ice cream I've ever had, up there with the legendary original Chocolate Pudding ice cream at Steve's I had one afternoon late in my freshman year and they never had on the menu again for years and years.
While I finished my gelato, Marjorie tried to get into Santa Croce, which contains the tombs of many of Florence's greatest artists, including Michaelangelo, but the entrance was too far away and so she didn't get in.
We passed a memorial to the flood of 1966, which I remember so vividly from when I was a kid (Florence and Detroit are sister cities).
On the ride home, we were told this building was the Florence synagogue, but we never got a good shot of it.
We got home, benched licht for the second night of Chanukah and passed an evening trying to process all we'd gone through. There is a particular psychological condition that comes from seeing too many museums in Florence (specifically Florence, nowhere else). We avoided it, but it was, as Twain might say, a near run thing.
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