Time Difference: -8 hours (from Brisbane)
Soundtrack: Velvet Underground, Muse (before they were crap), barbershop
Currently Inspired by: Every single thing in this entire city
Words written: 89,502, weirdly PRECISELY 6,000 words since last week's blog. I am so close to having a completed first draft I can almost taste it.
I must begin with an apology. In my last blog I said that the interior dome
of the Duomo is covered in 3.62 kilometres of painting. My current travel companion here in Florence,
who also happens to be a maths teacher, tells me this is impossible. I insisted that the thing I read in there
said that it definitely had 3,6002 metres of painting, at which he
sort of giggled, actually, and said that 3,600 square metres is not the same as
3.6 square kilometres. I believe him,
although I still don’t understand why they are not the same thing (this is not
an invitation to attempt to explain it to me.
It has been tried, and it has failed.
I’m no good at maths!) however I apologise for misleading anyone.
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| Cosimo Medici, in the ceiling |
Something I simply cannot believe is that another week has
passed by so quickly. As another sunny,
sleepy Sunday rolls around, I sit here, full of pasta and fruit, wondering what
the hell I have done for the last seven days!
I know there was definitely a trip to the Palazzo Vecchio. If you don’t know who the Medici family are, you
need to check them out here. They were
the ruling family of Florence for centuries and an interesting bunch to the
last. The Palazzo Vecchio retains an
extraordinary amount of its original decoration from Cosimo Medici’s (the
father of the line) time there, including original statues and art by
Michelangelo himself. Many of the
Medicis over the years had themselves painted into mythical or religious
pictures in their homes, or had themselves immortalised in marble
sculptures. Woe betide the artist who rendered
them in an unflattering manner!
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| Another Michelangelo |
As narcissistic and self aggrandising as a lot of the art
therefore is, it is still incredibly beautiful, in that rich, overwrought
Italian sort of way. The sheer density
of decoration in the palaces and cathedrals here is enough to blow your
mind. No surface is spared. Some of the ceilings alone contain artwork
worth a good half an hour’s inspection, and how many rooms do you think there
were in the palaces? In addition, if you
are taking a tour, or have an audio guide or a detailed pamphlet, you don’t just
look, you have to try and absorb the meaning of everything as well, and as
interesting as it all is, again the sheer volume of it is overwhelming.
“She’s raising
her right hand, which indicates she’s banishing the barbarians related to her
father from the land. Her red cloak is
representative of the region of Tuscany, and the turtle in the background
represents her son, the prince that died in battle whose logo was a turtle. The sea in the background represents Neptune
calling forth the wind to blow away her grief, and the shining beetle next to
her foot symbolises her purity.” (None
of that was real by the way, but you get the idea). Absolutely everything is imbued with these kinds
of significant details. It’s impossible,
finally, to take all of it in. You just
have to drift around and let things attract you as they may.
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| Part of Palazzo Pitti |
Speaking of which, Florence contains several Palazzos, and
none is larger than Palazzo Pitti, a short walk over the Ponte Vecchio, where I
recently bought myself a new chain to replace my favourite white gold necklace,
lost in Brisbane just before I left on this trip. This palace is newer than the Palazzo Vecchio
(literally the Old Palace) and was
the home of the Medicis from the late 1700s, so it is in much better
condition. Again, the profusion of
artwork on display is exhausting. Room
after room in the apartments has at least three walls filled with framed
paintings, by several of the most famous Italian painters of the day. Up to 25 were stacked on top of and next to
each other in every room, and I’m sure I went through at least 20-30 rooms just
in the apartments.
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| False front style, to look raised |
There are also extensive ceiling decorations in each room,
as well as painted or plastered cornices, mosaic frescos, heavy fringed
tapestries, detailed skirting, gilded mirrors, masses of hand carved wood
furniture, heavy drapery and these gigantic crystal chandeliers the size of
small cars, dripping golden light onto every available surface. The apartments alone would have been enough,
but that was only one area of one wing of the palace. The rest of it contained a modern art museum,
a “Japonism” exhibition which relates to the influence of Japanese art on
European artists, a modern Japanese art exhibition, a comprehensive costume
gallery containing actual suits, shoes, gowns and wedding dresses from the
1700s to modern times, the clothes that Cosimo Medici, his wife and son were
buried in, in the 1600s (partially reconstructed), a treasures museum
containing everything from golden forks to giant statues, a marble sculpture
display, a porcelain museum, and huge rose-filled gardens that rise up to an
incredible view. Exhausted, yet? I was.
It took HOURS.
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| Ugly without, beautiful within |
Another fairly prominent testament to the hubris and
arrogance of the Medici family is the Basilico di Lorenzo, a huge Basilica not
far from the Duomo with a frightfully ugly exterior enclosing a precious, if
rather spare by usual standards, interior.
Kind of the opposite of the Duomo, which is like someone who spends a
lot of time at the gym, getting tanned, manicured, pedicured, bleached and
waxed but never tries to improve their mind or say anything interesting. I think the main reason the Duomo is so dull
inside is because they’ve removed most of the interesting pieces from it and
put them into a museum in the square which you have to pay to go into. The Basilico di Lorenzo on the other hand,
still contains all of its original works and has behind it a chapel built to house
the dead bodies of the Medicis.
I didn’t call it a crypt, because a crypt to me brings to
mind a dank, creepy underground place roughly hewn from stone, with holes in
the walls. This was a gigantic round
chamber, as tall as the main part of a cathedral, lined in massive pieces of
dark grey and red marble, with huge grey marble sarcophagi about the size of a mini
van and each easily weighing several tonnes, for the corpses of the Medici men
(not their wives or daughters, of course).
One each, with a carved niche above where the coffin rests in which an
almost double life sized statue of the said Medici sits, guarding over himself
in the coffin. I mean... come ON! Were they serious? It’s a horribly excessive place for a pile of
bones to spend eternity in. Not as
excessive as a pyramid, perhaps, but STILL.
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| Sciency stuff |
The Galileo Museum, dedicated to the preservation and
display of a crazy number of scientific instruments from the 1500s to early
1900s including the only surviving instruments built by poor Galileo* himself, made
for a refreshing, if rather baffling, change from the art and gold and
architecture everywhere here. Baffling because what the hell is a mariner’s
astrolabe when it’s at home, and refreshing because it’s a curious and
interesting thing to see a gigantic globe of the world with a big empty swathe
of ocean where Australia and New Zealand are supposed to be (as they were not “discovered”
at the time these globes were produced).
There are lots of little hidden treasures in Florence. The tiny windy streets make for the perfect
setting in which to get lost. No matter
where you go, you are only ever a few minutes away from popping out into a
previously undiscovered piazza, no doubt containing some religious,
architectural or marble masterpiece.
It’s a place I will hold in the deepest of affection for a long time I
think. It’s definitely going on “The
List”. You can click here to see my second photo album from the delectable Firenze.
A great wet sloppy kiss to anyone who "gets" the title of this blog.
Til Next We Speak
*LOVE*
N
* Why “poor Galileo”?
Click here to read about the persecution he suffered as a result of his incredible
scientific discoveries.
Because the planet Venus will be passing in front of the sun, while you are in Florence, also called in Italian Firenze as in this ref:
ReplyDelete"Firenze is a centaur and, beginning in Order of the Phoenix, a Divination teacher at Hogwarts. He is described in the book as a palomino centaur with astonishingly blue eyes. He is quite good-looking, and many of the female population at Hogwarts are attracted to him. He first appears towards the end of Philosopher's Stone, in which he rescues Harry from Voldemort in the Forbidden Forest. Having carried Harry to safety on his back, Firenze is involved in an altercation with the rest of his centaur herd in the forest, who object to the symbolic suggestion that centaurs are subservient to humans."
I dare say it would have something to do with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
ReplyDeleteNope! :)
DeleteFirz is Florence - Florence in Italian is Firenze. Firz is a homophone of 'furs'. Venus in Furs is a song about BDSM by The Velvet Underground, as well as a classic of psycho-erotic literature on the same theme by von Sacher-Masoch. The Venus in question in your title is either or both yourself (eg Nat in Florence) or one of the many examples of art depicting Venus in the Uffizi, which is in Florence. How did I do?
ReplyDeleteMonte: a very complex response, but within it yes, the answer. Finally! I've had people emailing me, everyone thinks it's about the book (thanks mum, I really needed to know that you owned it lol). It was about the Velvet Underground song, as I had been listening to it while in Florence (Firz), looking at Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Well done my friend! *BIG WET SLOPPY KISS*
Deleteawwwwwww........ my heart is a pool of molten caramel.
ReplyDelete