Surprisingly little spinach

Tuesday, June 30 and Wednesday, July 1 - Florence

One of the things I like about Florence is how clearly it shows the residue of political scheming. Vicious squabbles and betrayals from five hundred years ago are evident in the buildings you pass as you walk the streets — an obliterated face in a fresco here, a bold coat of arms there. It's a city laid out by cruel calculation, mostly by the Medici, and it still retains a trace of that feeling.

We were lucky enough to be there at the same time as one of adfamiliares's colleagues from Skidmore and his family, who graciously showed us around the city on our first night, taking us past the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio and the overburdened Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno. (You can just see it at the right side of the photo above. The buildings are in the Oltrarno, on the other side of the river from most of Florence.) What a relief it was to be able to speak English for a whole night! They also clued us in to the best gelato in Florence, which we spent the rest of our visit trying to find again.

The following day, we didn't see a lot of things that were unexpectedly closed, and did see a lot of things I wasn't allowed to take pictures of, notably:

• The Uffizzi gallery. It contains room after room of splendid medieval art in gold leaf, and Botticelli's Birth of Venus carefully preserved beneath an enormous pane of glass. The wide hallway linking the galleries is lined with dozens of busts of famous Romans.


• The Basilica of San Lorenzo (to which the Medici Chapel is attached). In one side chapel, a sarcophagus of silver and rose-colored glass holds the tiny skeleton of a fourth-century Roman saint, still wearing his sandals. Beside him lie a dry palm frond and an inexplicable hollow tube about the size of a Slim Jim. (adfamiliares says it was Saint Caesonius, but I can't verify that online.) The dome above another chapel shows the night sky, carefully painted to represent the positions of the stars and planets on one particular night in the 15th century. Nobody knows what happened on that date.

Happily, I was not prevented from taking pictures in the streets. ( You know the drill! )

The complete set is here. (I have 18 more of these posts to make, by my estimation, so get comfortable.)

The Museum of the History of Science

Thursday, July 2 - Florence

You're looking at a particularly tricky armillary sphere. Everything from the circular degree markings inward is a reflection in a spherical mirror, distorting the skewed cuboid framework around it into a perfect image of circular rings. (You can see some of the backwards numbers painted on the frame.) The actual corners are smoothed into curves, and the "cubical" joins between the rings are just trompe-l'oeil paintings on flat wood. The whole thing rotates on its axis around the mirror, to permit measurements of the reflected night sky.

And that's us, in the Museum of the History of Science! Alas, it was an abbreviated experience. We knew we were going to see only part of the collection, due to ongoing renovations, but it wasn't until I started looking at the website that I saw what a wealth of treasures were denied to us. Not only the famous stuff, which we knew was on tour — Galileo's telescope, and his middle finger — but orreries and clocks and prismatic lenses and what-all. I'm glad we went (and we did get an admission discount), but I'd like to go back to see the other three-quarters of the collection.

Even so, there were plenty of goodies to capture. ( Click for SCIENCE! )

For the whole set, go here. The website (which is fabulous) has individual pages for most of the items in their collection, and I linked most of my Flickr pictrs to their official pages, if you find yourself wanting more info about anything.