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Published: January 13th 2015
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Florence is, quite simply, beautiful. Beautiful people dressed in beautiful clothes, speaking a beautiful language, walking amidst beautiful architecture containing beautiful works of art or deliciously beautiful food. It is all rather humbling and sometimes, to be honest, a little annoying. No city should be this perfect!
There are a few blemishes: the insistent gypsy beggar, overpriced gelato, hotel receptionists who never smile or make eye contact, cars that drive too fast through pedestrian areas. But all of this pales into insignificance next to the massive marbled Duomo which actually made all 4 of us, when we first came upon it, stop in our tracks to just stare, non-believing at the sheer size and audacity of a church! The thing is enormous and extravagantly carved and decorated in marble, bronze and gold, and you just can't grasp its size until you walk all around it and climb up the dome to see it from above.
Aside from the Duomo Cathedral and baptistry full of gold and precious stone mosaics, the Ponte da Vecchio (Vecchio bridge) which is something straight out of a history book. It is a bridge with flying buttresses on both outer sides holding up extra room
for the protruding shops that are lined all along the inner length of the bridge (nowadays just expensive jewellery shops for the tourists but you can easily imagine the merchants of ages past).
Then there is the Santa Maria Novella Basilica and convent. (I don't know the difference between a cathedral and a basilica). This cathedral is stunning for the frescoes that completely line the church and also the arches and walkways of the convent. Not just any old frescoes either, we came upon Uccello's and Giotto's work recognisable from my COFA days. The little side chapel, almost at the end of our visit, took our breath away and the girls and I sat for ages staring at all the detailed stories and images in the frescoes covering the walls. I especially loved a little non-descript section of dancing girls (in photos)
And last but not least, the Uffizi Art Gallery. Every room has paintings straight out of the exemplar books on the history of art. My all time favourite artist is Sandro Botticelli and I had the good fortune of seeing not just the Primavera but also the Birth of Venus and the Madonna and child. We
also saw celebrated masterpieces by da Vinci, Titian, Carravagio, Rembrandt, Rubens and, of-course, Michelangelo. We even saw some El-Greco and Uccello and also many gorgeous ancient Roman sculptures. We stayed until we were almost starving but even then we continued until we had seen it all. Enjoy the photos of the artworks on this blog.
One last thing...we discovered, almost by accident, a small, fascinating museum celebrating the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. We watched a film and got to play with and touch the incredible inventions lovingly re-created by a man from Florence who studied Leonardo's drawings. No better way to while away an entire afternoon than getting inside the mind of a genius.
These are some aside general comments
They don't know about quality tea. Actually, we can include the US in this observation. Lauren and I (big tea appreciators, especially green tea and Earl Grey tea) have not had a decent cup of tea (let alone even seen an electric jug/kettle) since leaving Oz. It's best to stick to coffee and even then, it's best to have a little expresso coffee like you are having a hit of coffee rather than a
leisurely chat over a slow cappuccino. You can just forget this, it is a completely different culture here. In Italy, people walk in to the cafe, stand up at the bar and order an expresso, sip it quickly then leave. It's fast, small and very,very strong. In the tourist areas you can have a cafe latte which is a small very milky weak coffee or an "American coffee' (not even worth mentioning as it it really is what it suggests) In Portugal, the Portuguese just had alcohol: beer, wine or port at any time of day, rather than meals or coffee. In France the coffee is also usually a tiny expresso but it is a more relaxed process as you usually sit in a cafe or bistro and have it. You have it with a thickened milk they call cafe "creme' but it tastes unusual and not like cream or milk...more like thickened UHT milk so you're better off having an expresso like everyone else. Ask for a "cafe au lait" (coffee with milk) and they act like you're speaking a foreign language. The lesson learned? Just have an expresso, and if you don't appreciate expressos then just drink wine
or carry around your bottled water at all times and forget the whole cafe scene until you return home.
Tonight, Christine and I saw "Mr Turner" (at a little Parisian cinema near the Catacombs) because we missed watching films and we also miss the English language. It was a rather strange film, almost like watching a portrait or a snapshot of a time period (all the social and cultural norms on full display) rather than a movie about an artist. The film captured the little nuances of William Turner's life and times and spoke a lot more about England and the Academy art scene of the late C18th and early C19th than it actually revealed about the man himself. I know no more about his perceptions of nature and how and why he painted than I did before, although I find myself liking him less and pitying his women more. It was an usual film and long too but somehow, somehow, I would recommend it, because it was a fascinating, albeit non-eventful, study of an epoch.
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