stories I've heard

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Stories needed to be told:

Opera del Duomo-Santa Maria del Fiore-
(information thanks to Lorenzo, with whom I enjoyed a "ciocolatto caldo" a half an hour earlier. And may I point out at this opportune time that Chiaroscuro, the cafe where we enjoyed our beverages, offer not just hot chocolate but also cioccolate calda (pronounce the c in calda as a h) with ammeretto, or mint, orange, vanilla, nocciola, or perhaps even white chocolate, fondente, milk or latte. The list went on and not even the waiter could stop mid stream.)

So. here's the real point to a little known story about the work that goes into upkeeping such immense monuments such as the Duomo....
7-8 men who work every day of the year (except Sunday) on the upkeep of the Duomo. This tremendous task includes among many things cleaning the marble internal and external (damaged by wind, rain, pollution, pidgeons, etc), re-sculpting exact replicas of pieces too damaged to be patched (sculptures, columns and mosaic-decorated pieces), damage to the marble floors, etched stone frames, finding damaged tiles and creating new ones from Florentine terra cotta, which are then laid to rest 10 years to gain “age” as necessary to merge with the other tiles covering the grand cupola (by Brunelleschi) of the Duomo,

The tale of the Antonio Meucci-
thanks to info in the following website and conversations with TRUE FLORENTINE (and dang proud of it) PAOLO
Meucci

The true, Florentine, inventor of the telephone, blessed with bad luck, inadequate knowledge of English and poor entrepreneurial skills.
Born in Florence in 1808, studied design and mechanical engineering at L’Accademia delle Belli Arte and worked as a stage technician in Teatro Pergola and other theaters until he moved to Havana, Cuba in 1835.
Intrigued and intellectually fascinated with the sciences, while in Cabana Meucci designed a method of galvanizing metals which he applied to military equipment for the Cuban government as well as pursuing many other experiments.

One day, Meucci discovered a method of administering electric shock, and when administering this treatment to a friend suffering from illness, discovered that he could hear conversations in an adjoining room through a piece of copper wire. He spent the following ten years perfecting this communication device and promoting its commercialization.

However, leaving Cuba for New York, Meucci’s lack of English, and poor finances, along with horrible luck with managing his own ideas and inventions, lost not only all the profits for the inventions he did manage to produce and manufacture, but also eventually lost rights to his inventions. After an accident in Westfield NY aboard a steamship, while Meucci lay in the hospital bed, his wife sold the telephone prototype among many other working models to a second hand dealer for almost nothing. He lost the patent, which was later, somewhat illegally, gained by officials of Alexander Graham Bell’s company 1870’s.

The immigrant, although certainly not lazy, did lack much of the important “knowing” and was unable to hold onto neither his ideas or documentation of these inventions. For most of his life he fought for his inventor’s rights in novice America, despite episodes of extreme poverty in a foreign land and a genius intelligence.

So. Be literate. Know the rules as well as the “rules”. Believe in yourself. Your true story will eventually be told, even if hidden within the dirty wrinkles of history.

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