jere7my | Arno sunsets

Thursday and Friday, July 2-3 - Florence

We had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, on our second day in Florence, to take a day trip to see Il Palio in Siena. Il Palio is a medieval horse race, ridden bareback and breakneck, with jockeys being thrown from their saddles and banners flying and tens of thousands of spectators whooping and elbowing and drinking. Hemingway would've loved it.

We did not go.

I'm still not sure it was the right decision, but at that point in our travels we didn't think we wanted to tie ourselves to the train tracks of sensory overload for a day. We'd just scratched the surface of Florence, so we decided to stick around and visit Santa Croce, the dome and interior of Il Duomo, and the Museum of the History of Science (all described previously), and eat amazing tuna/salmon carpaccio for dinner at Lobs.

Before dinner, we visited the "Interactive Museum of Medieval Florence" (Museo Interattivo sulla Firenze Medievale), at my insistence, because I expected it to be a cheesy, exploitative museum of TORTURE. Perhaps it had been, at one time — I suspect the proprietor of retaining half a dozen wax figures of torture victims from a more successful iteration of the museum, and trying to incorporate them into his gritty, bookish, dilapidated, painfully depressing vision of medieval Florence. We were given a headset to share, and were held hostage by the droning voice of the narrator at each station, staring at a leprous head or a severed hand for upwards of ten minutes while he read paragraph after encyclopedic paragraph about hygiene and markets. It was a relief when we were allowed into the authentic medieval hovel (replicated on the site of an actual medieval hovel), where the male narrator was exchanged for a perky female voice that explained all the details of the dank, dark, windowless room we were sitting in: the stale loaf of bread on the table, the dirt, the family of creepy-ass mannequins sleeping on the floor that we had to pick our way through to leave. It was altogether bleak. (There is another torture museum in Florence, at the Porta San Giovanni, which I hear is much more successful.)

Happily,

adfamiliares is cleverer than me, and insisted we visit Oltrarno — the district across the Arno from most of Florence — in the evening. Crossing the river on the Ponte alla Carraia, we were stopped dead by an astonishing sunset, sinking down into the hills to the west and painting the Ponte Vecchio and the Ponte Santa Trinità to the east (see above). We watched the sun disappear for about fifteen minutes, feeling quite terribly honeymoony, before entering the quiet streets of Oltrarno, where we found the Palazzo Pitti, the curiously blank façade of Santo Spirito, and the most compellingly odd dirty graffito I saw in Italy (see below). Coming home, we passed an outdoor orchestra concert at the foot of the Palazzo Vecchio, and milled with the crowd for a while, while masterpieces of Renaissance art looked over our shoulders from the Loggia dei Lanzi and light-up spinners spun into the sky from hawkers' ripcords.

The view to the west.

Something has just splashed into the water here, in the reflection of the central arch. Note the nifty ram's head / hippocampus badge on the Ponte Santa Trinità.

Here are the Ponte Vecchio's arches from the other side, crossing back from Oltrarno. ("Vecchio" just means "old".)

The arms of Leo XI. He was pope for 27 days before he died. The motto at the bottom, "SIC FLORUI" ("Thus I flourished") alludes to that.

The medieval guilds all built statues for the façade of Orsanmichele, competing to see which could create the most splendid statue. This bronze "Christ and St. Thomas" is one of the more expensive, funded by the Tribunale di Mercanzia.

This is a Garibaldine monument to those who fell at the Battle of Mentana. The pigeon helps him aim.

These subtle, sooty ornaments are on the Palazzo Rasponi, tucked away near Santa Croce on a tiny street called the Borgo Santa Croce.

One more shot of Il Duomo, above one of the back doors.

Probably the most disgusting photograph I took in Italy, from the Museo Interattivo sulla Firenze Medievale. Enjoy!

On the Via del Moro, we passed this mysterious and sandy window display. We really wish we'd seen it doing whatever it does.

Florence is full of Vespas and tiny electric cars — and trikes! I love the moon-rickshaw logo.

The Palazzo Pitti, now a collection of galleries. Note the weird stabby bird sculpture.

This graffito perfectly expresses how I feel when I look at it. I feel that the box contains all of life's answers, if only I could open it.

The Loggia dei Lanzi is filled with masterpieces, right out in the open air where common folk can see them. This is Giambologna's Rape of the Sabine Women, which (Wikipedia tells me) is the first multi-figure sculpture in Western art to not have a preferred viewing angle. Here's another (taken in daylight), Cellini's Perseus:

We spent a lot of time drooling over the masks in Alice's Masks Studio, where master maskmaker (say that three times fast) Agostino Dessì and his daughter Alice work. (They have a website.)

Here we are on our last morning in Florence, having just learned that Santa Maria Novella was closed for some sort of festival. This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip.