Offices of the Medici

Florence is more normal than Venice. It has cars although most of the historical centre is pedestrian. Its buildings are sturdy rather than decaying and sturdy is my first impression. It has history and tourists aplenty given its place as the centre of the Renaissance. And I wanted to see Botticelli again. I’ve actually found him in various galleries but he’s artist central for the Uffizi. We went yesterday. The Uffizi Gallery is tourism central for Florence. I visited in the early ‘80s and you could just walk in. The arrangement too was different. As I remember, Birth of Venus sat in a room busy with furniture and more. It’s more clinical now but the art is still a wonder. We queued for 30 minutes, even with reservation, and passed through over the next 5 hours. It’s that big, an odd combination of Roman sculpture in the main corridors (the ancient world being the rediscovery of the Renaissance, of course) and Italian paintings from C13th-C18th century and some north European art thrown in. All those big names of that period: Giotto, Cimabue, Donatello, Leonardo, Botticelli, Lippi, Verocchio, Uccello, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, di Sarto, della Francesca, Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian ... and Rembrandt, Durer, Cranach. Mostly local. Then a temporary display of a Leonardo text, the Codex Leicester. There’s much more of this around in numerous galleries but our time is limited. This is tourist central but bliss none-the-less. Some pics.