Surprisingly little spinach

[jere7my]

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.

Two views from our room at the Hotel Globus. The Medici Chapel gets creepy at night.


Another shot from our hotel window.


The Palazzo Vecchio. Note the fabulous row of coats of arms.




Two shots of the Ponte Vecchio, which is overhung with buildings like dangling fruit. That orange one in the first photo is made entirely of cheese!


The Hospital of the Innocents. Those babies in blue basins represent the Basin of Abandonment, where unwanted babies were left for the nurses in the hospital. Later, it was replaced with a trapdoor and a lazy susan — a sort of after-hours baby depository, if you will:




In front of the hospital was this bizarre fountain, with tentacled sea otters and basin-shaped sea slugs (?), all bewhiskered.


An obliterated coat of arms on Santa Maria Maggiore. I get a suggestion of the crossed papal keys and papal tiara in the top part, and maybe one of the Medici balls at the top of the shield. The figure on the left suggests an angel to me, perhaps with a trumpet?


The pediment of Santa Maria Novella. The Teletubbies sun is a Dominican symbol, I am told. Swoopy S-volutes on the sides hold rosettes that seem to thrum with vibration, especially when viewed full-screen:




Florence's dual street numbering system: blue for residences, red for businesses. United colors indeed!


Cosimo I de Medici with a bird on his head.


An old-timey bookbinder. (With a new-timey website, it seems.)


I thought it was kinda neat to capture the same view of the moon Galileo had, even though it's the same moon we have here. (Note the closer resemblance to a big pizza pie, though.)

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

Comments

[asmanyaswill.livejournal.com]

Eighteen! Yay!

[jaipur.livejournal.com]

oh geez, I have some of EXACTLY those same sites from being in Florence 3 years ago! Freaky--I remember it so well. I love Italy... (SIGH)

[elwenlinuiel.livejournal.com]

did you see the ROUS's by the river? there are actually rats the size of cats that live in Florence... descendants of those originally carrying the Black Plague, and absolutely terrifying.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

No! I heard about the family of coypus that nest at the base of one of the bridges, and was so sad I missed them!