Thursday
Ciao Firenze! For all that it has really nothing to do with classics or anything Roman, I love Florence. The evidence of its time as a Renaissance city are everywhere, particularly in the graceful cathedrals and ducal palaces. The city also has a lot of piazzas—there are plenty of narrow alleyways, of course, but then they open onto beautiful open spaces full of people, light, and sculpture. Especially sculpture—it’s everywhere! Rome is a beautifully historic city, but it tends to hide its treasures away in museums. Florence is more like one giant museum all on its own. It’s even like a museum in that in several areas, you’re more likely to hear English than Italian!
For our day trip to Florence, we got up early and headed off to the train station. There was some confusion with trying to figure out which train to take, which Mom explains, but we did eventually find our train and settled in for the hour-and-a-half ride out to Florence. I love trains and the Italian countryside, and spent most of the ride with my face pressed to the window. We got to Florence and headed for the small tourist information center near the station, where Dad managed to get us a map in a very entertaining exchange with one of the attendants. She asked where we were from, heard that we were Americans, and promptly grabbed a map, circled the Duomo, Accademia, and Uffizi Gallery, pointed out the direction we needed to start heading, and sent us on our way. Given that those were actually the three main places we wanted to see...well, I guess it’s okay to be a typical tourist every once in a while :) Remarkably, we didn’t need the map all that often—Florence is a relatively straightforward city (if you’re looking for the tourist places, at least), and I actually remembered quite a lot of it. Our first stop was...well, it was supposed to be the cathedral, but first Mom and I were distracted by a stand selling scarves in every color of the rainbow. Dad stood by and rolled his eyes as we browsed through the selection and finally headed off to the cathedral, each with a few more scarves than we had started with.
The Duomo! I’m sure this cathedral has a name, but I don’t know what it is—I’ve only ever heard it called “the cathedral”. It is stunningly glorious and gigantic. Unfortunately, that means it's very hard to get good pictures of much more than pieces of it!
Here’s as much of the face of the cathedral as I could get pictures of. The outside is all made of beautiful white and green marble, with different colored (often red) accents.
The side of the cathedral—you can see that this is a very large, very fancy building.
Dad wanted this picture of Mom and me in front of the cathedral doors—the doors are very pretty (and original from the Renaissance period), but there was another group of tourists taking pictures in front of them, so we stood a little off to the side instead.
The Duomo is actually three separate buildings—the actual cathedral, the bell tower, and the baptistry. Here you can see the baptistery and the bell tower separately.
The baptistery door panels are even more spectacular, and are also original. I believe they’re made of brass, and as you can see they’re very detailed.
After we had wandered around the Duomo and some of the shops around it, we headed for the Accademia museum to see if we could avoid the lines by going in at lunch time. We did in fact get quite lucky, and had a relatively brief wait before getting to go inside. The Accademia is one of those frustrating museums which prohibit photos (and have lots of guards), so there are obviously no photos. They did have an impressive collection—I was most interested in the musical instrument collection, with lots of unusual instruments as well as the more common ones, as well as antique pianos and harpsichords which they had someone playing so you could hear the different tones. There was also a room full of plaster “practice” sculptures which were very neat—I enjoy seeing evidence of the procedure of art as well as the finished works. A lot of them looked like acupuncture patients, because small bits of metal were sticking out of highly detailed areas like faces—focal points for the artist when they carved the sculpture in marble for real! Of course, the main reason anyone goes to the Accademia is to see the David. I’ve seen it before, and to be honest it’s not my favorite piece of sculpture, so I mostly enjoyed watching Mom gasp as she rounded the corner to see it, perfectly centered in the middle of the room on a pedestal. I’ll let her take care of the gushing about it, and instead talk about the room leading up to the David. There’s a series of about four partially-finished sculptures by Michaelangelo in the room, and these were the ones where I was especially frustrated that we couldn’t take photos—it’s not hard to get a postcard of the David, but these aren’t exactly easy to find pictures of. I’m sure most of you have heard how Michaelangelo described sculpting as freeing the shape from the marble, and I feel like these really show that off. They’re very roughly done, and in some cases there are just vague half shapes of arms and legs in a huge chunk of marble, but the mastery of the work is still obvious, and I think all the more beautiful for their rough state.
We eventually dragged ourselves away for lunch, where we unfortunately ended up at a tourist trap restaurant which wasn’t great food-wise or price-wise. Well, I wasn’t too displeased—but I was lucky that I was in the mood for basic ravioli, whereas Mom and Dad were a little more adventurous...not a good idea in touristy areas. After lunch we wandered around a bit more, in the approximate direction of the Uffizi gallery (the slightly more famous museum—the Accademia has the David, but the Uffizi has all of the other works of note in Florence), but weren’t too bothered when we couldn’t find it. Actually, I think we did go by it—but we weren’t paying very much attention to signs, so we probably walked right past it. Instead, we browsed through piazzas and marketplaces (I tried to find the piazza with all of the leather and gold shops on it that I’d been to when I was in Florence with Magistra, but unfortunately couldn’t), and did manage to make our way to a main piazza with lots of sculpture on it that I had remembered.
One of the many piazzas in Florence that we wandered through. They’re such beautiful open spaces, and are always filled with people walking, talking, eating—it’s a wonderful snapshot of Italian life.
Look! It’s the David!...but it’s a fake (obviously). The statue depicting the Rape of the Sabine Women (a very old myth of the founding of Rome) is the original though—which is a bit ironic, as the plaster practice sculpture of it is also in the Accademia with the real David.
We eventually wandered all the way to the Arno river, which cuts through Florence. It’s a very lovely river, with lots of bridges crossing over it, and plenty of gold shops lining the banks—Florence is the city of leather and gold. We didn’t buy anything, but we did admire the manufactured beauties of Florence as well as the natural ones.
This wasn’t actually intended to be an artsy-fartsy shot—but it sort of came out as one and I’m rather proud of it. I call it my postcard picture, because it looks like it belongs on one. More modestly, it shows you how gorgeous the river is, and how wonderful the weather was for our visit.
After we’d made it to the river, we decided it was getting a bit late and that we should start heading back toward the train station. Thankfully, we didn’t have any problems finding our way back, and we did manage to get tickets and get on a train before it got dark.
I have no idea what this building is—we saw it on our way back to the train station and were fascinated by the stepped architecture and the domes. I recall practically standing on my backpack so that I didn’t have to worry about thieves while I obsessively framed this shot.
We’d taken the fast train out to Florence so that we could have most of the day to explore, but took the slow train back because the tickets were significantly cheaper. Unfortunately, this meant the ride was about four hours long...not much fun (especially when my headphones broke and I was music-less while Mom and Dad read). The seats are relatively comfy though, and we did eventually make it back to Rome and then home to bed.
Mom liked Florence!
Our first away trip was to Florence. On Thursday we had breakfast early and headed to the train station and bought our tickets. We decided to take the express train there (faster) and the local train home (cheaper). We didn't leave much time to catch the train and were panicked when we didn't see Firenze (Florence) listed on the timetables. Luckily figured out that we were taking a train to Milan with a stop in Florence. Express train got us there in 1 ½ hours....really nice! We were fortunate that most of the sites in Florence are concentrated in the area around the train station, so we walked everywhere. Stopped at a tourist information store for a map and off we went. Headed straight for the Duomo....a very impressive structure. I wasn't sure if going to Florence meant paying money for a train ticket and seeing “more of same” like Rome. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the architecture was very different! After taking lots of pictures of the Duomo and bell tower, and finding some great shops and booths (Katie and I loved looking at the wool/silk/cashmere scarves and buying some in lots of beautiful colors), we headed to the Accademia museum and the Statue of David. Here was another place I was worried about crowds and standing in line for hours. We got there right at lunch time and after about 20 minutes were in the door. The museum had some beautiful artwork and sculptures; also a music room with a few reproductions of older harpsichords (with the originals nearby) that someone would play a piece so you could hear how they sounded. But the real highlight was David himself. Very impressive....the detail in such a large sculpture....you saw something different every time you walked around it. Again, you couldn't take any pictures, but it would have been difficult to capture such a priceless piece! After tearing ourselves away (again, we were starving) we caught a late lunch at a sidewalk cafe. Didn't get so lucky this time....touristy food that was pricey and not very good. We continued to walk around Florence looking in some of the many shops (they seemed more welcoming to me than the snooty ones in Rome), we ended up at the Arno River....very pretty. Took lots of pictures on a bridge over the river. It was starting to get late, so headed back to the train station before dark. The ride back took FOREVER (almost four hours). Oh well....still was a nice day!
No comments:
Post a Comment