Piu di Firenze

Florence deserves time but were are just passing through. It’s another ridiculously touristy town, at least in the historical centre, but the collections are great and the museums are many. It claims jazz but my one attempt for a Monday night jam met with an empty stage and we weren’t there for weekend gigs. Always save something for next time. But I have more pics and here are some.

Academy and thereabouts

I’d expected lines at L’Accademia but no. I walked straight in. This is one of the two top attractions with the Uffizi. It’s the home of David, Michelangelo’s huge statue and probably the symbol of the Renaissance humanism. I walked through. It was moderately busy but this gallery is pleasantly small. There are statues and paintings, presumably as examples for the students of art, of David’s era or before, there was a gallery of plaster casts, again for students, and a small collection of musical instruments. That included a quintet of strings by Stradivarius, once owned by the Medici and two early double basses, on small with 3 strings next to one large with 5. There were some diminutive timpani. David was huge and impressive but we all know the scene so well from pics so no surprise. Then the Museum of Pietra Dura. It’s something odd and apparently particularly Florentine, the art of inlayed polished stones used to create images. Again, a favourite of the Medici. It’s used on table tops, for panels as in paintings, for altars and various boxes and household products for the rich. Amusing and quite stunning when done well. It glows with colour and keeps its colour indefinitely. It’s sometimes in relief. L’Accademia and the Museo delle pietre dure are in Florence.

Lesser but hardly pittiable

It’s unfair to talk of quantity or quality in Florence, but none-the-less the Uffizi remains the star relative to the Pitti palace. The Pitti was the home the Medici and is ridiculously grand in the Florentine palace style that became the model for banks and with lavish interior decoration. You can only wonder what it would have been to live in such a place (you could ask QE2 right now) but then you’d have plenty of servants to help. Ultimately, the queen still goes to the loo (I know it’s true because during construction I saw the loo built for her in our Parliament House) and people are always interested in such things (think Space Station). The example offered at the Pitti is Napoleon’s bathroom from when he was in cahrge. It’s nestled amongst massed paintings on the second floor with walls covered floor to high ceiling with Raphaels and Botticelli and Tiziani and more. There are some masterpieces here, but walking through is not quite the breathtaking experience of the Uffizi. Thus fewer queues, too. The paintings form the Palatine collection; there are several other collections. The Museo degli Argenti (Medici Treasury) and the Porcelain collection are grouped together with a stunning collection of religious works and reliquaries and indulgent household items and some oddities that are amusing in their excess. There’s some modern jewellery, too, still being donated to the museum (perhaps for tax purposes as happens in Australia). There’s a costume museum that is all modern other than for three pieces retrieved from graves of three Medici. They are not in great condition but interestingly they display cuts and how they were made. There’s a Gallery of Modern Art that hardly reaches the C20th. And the Boboli Gardens, a garden in the grand European tradition of private gardens for the wealthy. Some pics.