I married him. (Just kidding. But gold star for you if you got the Jane Eyre reference!) Our day in Florence did not involve me getting married, but it did involve lots of beautiful art and architecture - it was very much like taking the first few weeks of art history again, except I was seeing everything in real life. Anyway, we woke up to a beautiful, sunny morning in Florence and began our day's adventures at a market, where we got bread and apples for almost no money. We ate on the steps of the Basilica San Lorenzo, watching the tour groups and the astonishing number of couples who stopped to make out in the middle of the street. Discretion didn't appear to be a major concern in Italy. Following our breakfast of champions, we set off to take in all of Florence that we possibly could before our train that evening.
We began at the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, which was completed in 1436 when Filippo Brunelleschi worked out how to build the beautiful dome, which was an engineering marvel at the time. It was the highest dome built at that time, and used no external buttresses for support, ergo Brunelleschi = wizard.
Across the square is the Florence Baptistry, with Lorenzo Ghiberti's famous Gates of Paradise. He won the contract to carve the door panels with biblical scenes after his panel depicting the sacrifice of Isaac beat Brunelleschi's in a competition.
Close-up of the Gates of Paradise - most of the panels depict scenes of Christ's life.
Ta da! Michelangelo's "David." This is only a replica, but it stands where the original used to be in Piazza della Signoria. It is very impressive in real life, and it is enormous!
This is actually more or less where my photos of Florence run out, because we spent the rest of the day queuing to get into the Uffizi, the massive art museum. We queued for at least two hours, but it was worth it - it was a beautiful day, we still had lots to catch up on, the area around the Uffizi was gorgeous, and there were lots and lots of buskers there to take advantage of tourists who were not travelling on student budgets. We found out that it was actually the tail end of Culture Week, which meant free admission to the museum, so that was especially awesome. We spent the afternoon admiring works by Giotto, Botticelli, Raphael, da Vinci, Michelangelo - basically any famous Italian Renaissance artist. I am so glad that I decided to take art history last year, because I would have had no appreciation for what I was seeing otherwise. I was surprised at how many families with very young children were in the museum, as well. I admire the parents for travelling with such young children, but part of me wonders what the point was - they're travelling through these incredible places, but the kids aren't going to remember much, if anything at all, and something tells me that most of the kids that we saw didn't have a keen appreciation for Renaissance art. Sarah, Caitlin, and I decided that this was probably the most opportune time to take a trip like this - we have the time, we have the energy, but we also have the educational background to appeciate what we are seeing in these beautiful places. Please don't read that last sentence as me being pretentious - I don't mean to. But this year has made me realize how little appeciation I had for the amazing places that I visited when I was in Europe four years ago because I didn't bother to educate myself, and I really regret that. Hence my obsession with historical information and walking tours.
So that was Florence - we managed to see most of the sites on our list in under 24 hours, which I think is pretty impressive. It seemed like a beautiful city, and I would have liked to see more, but Rome was calling. We grabbed sandwiches and caught our train to the Eternal City, but our adventures for the day were certainly not over. More on that in my next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment