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Hoo-hah. I completed revisions to chapter 11 on schedule, and passed page 200. Also finally named an Empress (and since she has two names, that took extra-long). Chapter 12 is printed — it's the first "nadir" chapter, in which everything Scrutiny has hoped for and had faith in is dashed to bits. Should be fun!

Church of the dead

Thursday, July 2 - Florence

It's taking me longer and longer to upload photos. On the one hand, I keep learning new things to do in Photoshop to spruce them up, and each new technique adds time. On the other, once they're prettified, I'm compelled to research each photo, so I can accurately tag them — Who painted it? Where was it? When was it built? So, for instance, I know that the funeral monument above was Félicie de Fauveau's last and greatest work, sculpted in 1858, and that the ascending soul is that of Louise Favreau. This takes time, enough time that I could probably be called self-indulgent, but it also deepens my appreciation of the places we visited on our vacation. I see connections I wasn't aware of before (Brunelleschi is everywhere!), and I feel I'm adding to the sum total of knowledge on the internet.

Louise Favreau's funeral monument is in Santa Croce, which is all about tombs and cenotaphs: Michelangelo's tomb, Galileo's tombs (the secret one and the public one), Dante's cenotaph (he's buried in Ravenna, as you may recall), Machiavelli's cenotaph. Dozens of heraldically splendid floor tombs. Monuments to Marconi and Florence Nightingale, and the monument to Niccolini that was the basis for the Statue of Liberty. It's not as opulent as St. John Lateran, but it's not for nothing that it's called the Temple of the Italian Glories. There are also two perfect cloisters, hatfuls of grand frescoes, and quite a nice museum, to boot.

( Cut for Italian Glories! )

85 more photos available on Flickr.