Firenza, the meat and potatoes

Sunday, June 2

In a city like Florence, there is no way that human being can see all the art in a single visit.  One museum is more important and more impressive than the next.  A visit to a single museum like the Uffizi could be an entire semester's art history course at the university.  Luckily we had a couple of advantages on our tour.

1. It was late May / early June and only a million tourists had shown up so far.  Therefore, the crowds in the cathedrals and museums were merely crushing but not suffocating.
2. We bought the various tourist cards, like the FirenzeCard, which affords priority admission to the venues.  What a pleasure to walk up to the special priority entrance while bunches of people wait in line for their turn.

After breakfast this morning we headed to the Galleria dell' Accademia.  This is a small museum with some of the blockbuster sculptures from Renaissance Florence.  Here stands the origianal David by Michelangelo.  It is absolutely humbling to stand before that statue.  As if that weren't enough, the series of unfinished Priggioni (prisoners but usually called the slaves) line the hall leading up to the David.  Michelangelo was able to depict the raw power of the struggle of the priggioni against the marble rock from which they are escaping. 

Then, besides those great works, there were other sculptures that have their own pages and chapters devoted to them in art history tomes.  Early musical instruments, including an Amati Cello and some wind and string instruments that one would never see today, were exhibited in a section of the Accademia.  Finally, entire rooms were devoted to the art of plaster casting -- how plaster copies and originals are made.  No photos are permitted in the Accademia; so we can't prove that we were ever there.  When we came out, the line was down the street and around the corner -- several hundred people waiting to get in.

We took the bus to a stop near the Ponte Vecchio and walked across the Arno River on the old bridge.  During the Renaissance, the bridge was lined with shopkeepers selling their wares.  Still is, but exclusively jewelers.  In the middle of the bridge we came upon a peculiar phenomenon.  The little fence around a monument in the middle of the bridge was festooned with hundreds of padlocks.  What's going on here?

From there we went to the Pitti Palace which was purchased from the Pitti family by the Medicis in the 16th century.  We visited the museums in the palace as well as the living quarters, which remain much as they were at the time of the Medicis -- tapestries, huge carpets, full-wall paintings and frescoes, paintings by Titian and Raphael -- just the usual stuff.  The Giardino Boboli of the palace were enormous, and Yoyi was just too pooped to walk through them.  I almost got lost, but my trusty map program was accurate down to the paths in the garden, showing which ones were dead ends, for example.

We walked back across the Ponte Vecchio and started to unpack our lunch on the steps of the Loggia dei Lanzi.  The guard chased us away; this is a museum, he told us.  We looked around without any luck and asked a strolling policeman where we might find a park or a bench where we could have a "peekneek.  He told us that there is no place like that in the city.  Finally, we ate our lunch sitting on the wall at the edge of the river.

Sitting at the river, we were  100 meters from the entrance to the Uffizi gallery.  We "put on our running shoes," took advantage of our priority admission, and started through the museum.  Think about this image: You open your big fat art history book, and then you take the pages in one hand and flip through them as if you are shuffling a deck of cards, the pages passing at lightning speed.  That's about how we took in the Uffizi. The collection is beyond belief.

By late afternoon we were beat, and we spent an hour in the museum cafe on the roof enjoying a cappuccino and a beautiful clear afternoon with a view of the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio.  Yoyi was done by then, but I had recovered enough to spend a little more time in the museum while she went out into the courtyard and amused herself watching the tourists and the mimes.

After a taxi ride back to the hotel, we rested for an hour and went to a little family-run restaurant on the corner near the hotel.  I had ossobuco, as I attempted to sample those Italian dishes that are exotic, but still allowed.  It was delicious.  Of course, we ordered our 1/4 liter of red wine; maybe Yoyi is learning to appreciate wine....  We were back at the hotel by 9:00, before most Italians had sat down to dinner.