Florence, Saturday

Today is Saturday, so although the school parties are missing, there are a lots of Italian families out enjoying themselves. It’s been a beautiful warm sunny day, like an English summer, almost, but we think that March may be a bit late to be really out of season. The Italian school kids are well behaved – the most they do is look bored and inattentive, or spend their time texting instead of listening – but they do mill around.  So January or February may be better.

After breakfast we walked over to the Pitti Palace. First we went into the Palatine Gallery. There’s far too much to take in, and a lot isn’t top quality.  so we scanned each room for a couple of pictures we really wanted to look at, and concentrated on them. It worked really well. There are some lovely Raphaels, not the Madonna and child religious stuff, but portraits, including Agnolo Doni and his wife, a sulky madam. Mind you, Agnolo doesn’t look an easy going bloke, so perhaps she had her reasons. 

There’s one or two superb Titian portraits, and a really haunting Fra Bartolomeo, of the deposition.

The Royal apartments are (it seemed) just about as extensive as Versailles. But you can just keep walking – they don’t need studying. Some of the inlaid table tops were amazing, and we did admire them.  Also, there was a clock restorer working in one of the rooms. He had a very fancy French clock in pieces.

Clock, with Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday!

 In another room, there was a concert – piano, clarinet and violin or viola. It was quite an ambitious programme – too ambitious for Phil, who took a dislike to the Ysaye. But we enjoyed the other pieces and it was a very nice extra.

Another nice extra was a small display of documents from the archives; for example, there was the correspondence from Santa Croce about the reburial of Galileo there. It made up a bit for the accounting museum in Siena being closed. Phil is always talking about the lecture he plans to deliver on cruise ships, to be called “Adventures in Accountancy”; and of course Italian banks invented double entry bookkeeping.

Then there was the modern art gallery. Well, I suppose it’s all relative, but Florentine ideas of what counts as modern are not the same as, say, the Tate, or the Pompidou Centre. But we didn’t need to spend too much time there.

We had a fairly quick gallop through the costume museum, which concentrated on the clothes belonging to a few women, rather than showcasing designers. It was quite interesting, but there wasn’t much I coveted. The hat displays were fun, though there was hardly one I could imagine wearing.  A slightly yucky bit was the display of the remains of the clothes that Cosimo de Medici and his wife had been buried in. I don’t know why they dug them up to undress them, it all seemed very undignified. They even had Cosimo’s codpiece on display.

Fountain in the gardens

Then we went out into the Boboli Gardens. As I said, it was a beautiful day and the views from the top are superb. Also the lawns were covered with daisies, buttercups and anemones, so they looked lovely. Otherwise, all those hedges, shrubs and paths are quite boring, I find.

The Duomo, from the Boboli Gardens

Looking away from the city form the Boboli Gardens 

Then we thought, since we were over the river in Oltrarno, we should see Santo Spirito. It’s a magnificent building, high, elegant and austere, designed, like the cathedral, by Brunelleschi.

By this time we were knackered – there are an awful lot of flights of stairs in the Pitti, never mind the climbs in the garden. So we gave up and went back to the hotel for a rest before dinner.  We have found a very nice place, Ciro & Sons, a few minute’s walk away from the hotel, and we are sticking with it. If a place is good, they deserve for you to return. 

Siena

The place I remember most clearly and with most affection from my 1969 student trip to Italy, was Siena. I can’t remember anything very specific, just the Piazza del Campo and the music floating out of windows as one walked past, the men in medieval costume practising their banner twirling and throwing  and catching, and the gloriousness of it. I didn’t want to leave. Phil found that there is a bus from Florence to Siena, about once an hour, which takes about seventy five minutes. So today, off we went.

It was quite interesting to see the countryside, as it’s still really green. There are a lot less wild flowers and blossom than in Britain. Hurrah for Natural England.  Mind you, there are less flowers in gardens than in Britain. Perhaps the Italians are less keen on them. You needed to stare out at the countryside, as it is one of those old autostradas, built for Fiat Cinquecentos, with narrow lanes and tight corners, so the lorries just can’t keep in lane. I remember driving one around Genoa, and my blood pressure and heart rate going through the roof.

Siena, from the loggia of the Palazzo Communale

Siena is just as gorgeous as I remembered. Phil remembered the Duomo – I could only remember the green and white marble stripes, nothing about the inside. There’s a great chunk of building, less than half finished, where the Sienese started to build an enormous extension to the church. The building was halted by the Black Death, which killed two thirds of the inhabitants, and was never resumed. Mind you, the cathedral is large enough. A Sienese Pope, Pius II, left his books to the cathedral, and just off the nave is his library. It’s beautiful. There are superb frescos and ceiling, and lots of early antiphonals on display.

Ceiling of the library

 Pius II lived in the mid fourteenth century, but it’s all in the brightest, clearest colours and superb condition.  It’s been open since 1999, so neither of us had seen it and it was worth the trip almost by itself.

The cathedral museum has an arresting reliquary, with a skull grinning out of a crystal case, and bones bundled together with elaborate silk ribbons,  like some sort of macabre gift wrapping. If you visit Siena you mustn't miss that.  

We toured the Palazzo Communale. Siena lost to Florence (Hawkwood was involved, naturally) and development sort of stopped. So the Palazzo Communale was built at the end of the thirteenth century and looks untouched. Inside, the Chapel was completed at the very beginning of the fifteenth century, and has kept the same furnishings, including stunning choir stalls decorated with marquetry, the original hanging lamp, candlesticks and so forth. Phil wanted to take the whole chapel home. I don’t know if that is permitted in the rules of the game, but it’s such a perfect whole that you couldn’t have a bit of it. I chose an exquisite piece of goldsmith’s work – a golden rose bush, given to the city by Pius II.

We loved the Room of the Nine (the council of nine who governed Siena), and spent ages examining the wall paintings of the Allegories of Good Government and Bad Government.   

So then we just sat in Il Campo. We had a coffee at a pavement café, and then decided we really ought to have an ice cream. I chose a scoop each of dark chocolate, coffee and hazelnut. I actually think having three scoops was being greedy, and two would have been enough, because I was really full, but I wouldn’t be able to decide which flavour I could do without.

Piazza del Campo

It was so wonderful to return, and not be disappointed, but more in love with the place than ever.

Florence again.

Yesterday, we had prebooked, timed tickets for the Uffizi Gallery. So after breakfast we set off in the right direction, but slowly, so we could stop to look at the Loggia Dei Lanzi and anything else we passed which seemed of interest. Phil’s imagination was particularly stimulated by the bronze plaque marking the spot of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and the burning to death of Savonarola. It gave him the creeps.

Palazzo Vecchio

I’m busy trying to remember all the people who have a plaque on one of the palazzi to mark where they stayed in Florence. So far, I’ve noticed ones to George Eliot, Hans Christian Anderson, Mozart, Longfellow, and John Milton. Of course Florence Nightingale got her name because she was born here. Her less fortunate sister was born in Naples, so got landed with the name of Parthenope. But I suppose “Florence” sounded  pretty exotic as a name in those days; it’s just that it caught on, thanks to Nightingale’s fame. It’s not one I’d go for. The English (British?) habit of shortening names is too strong. My gran had a friend who was always called Florrie. Why is it that the French go for these hyphenated names and still no one shortens them, whereas in England even a two syllable name will be shortened to one syllable? Or, as in the case of “Florrie” a different, less attractive set of two syllables.

Back to our tour – the Uffizi has been refitting since 1999, and there is no end date, but this is actually fortunate, since the tour of what was open took us four hours; you get museum feet and backache, and you just can’t appreciate any more in four hours, so if there was even more to see ……

Actually the crowds congregate round certain pictures, so you can get a good look at others without being harried. But when you want to see one of the hotspot pictures, it’s difficult. At least nearly all the guides and their groups have headsets, so they aren’t yapping away, spoiling it for everyone else.  But when I went to see The Birth of Venus, I was driven away by a loud American father telling his son that this painting had been judged one of the three most famous paintings in the world by the New York Times! I presume that was his reason for wanting to see it – he didn’t seem to appreciate anything else about it. Over coffee and a rest, Phil and I had fun wondering what were the other two most famous pictures. We’re pretty sure one must be the Mona Lisa, but we couldn’t settle on a third at all – far too many candidates. 

It’s all very different from 1969. You can enjoy the rooms at the top of the building, which are immensely long corridors with fantastical painted ceilings, and the paintings are very well displayed, whereas I remember a series of smallish, darkish, rooms. So we concentrated on the early stuff – Giotto and Cimabue and so forth – and the Botticellis. I can take or leave Raphael. There were some fantastic portraits of Florentine bankers based in Bruges, by Memling, and a wonderful Cranach pair of Adam and Eve.  Phil’s going to have the small Botticelli of Judith with the head of Holofernes, so as he’s having that, I can choose a Cimabue. Or the Cranachs, as long as I can have them both. Although there was a very lovely sleeping child sculpture, a Roman copy of a Greek original; but it made me feel very sad, so probably not the best thing to have in your home. 

Finally we went across the Ponte Vecchio for a very late lunch, and pottered back to the hotel via Orsanmichele, which has an incredibly elaborate altar and altarpiece by Daddi, well worth seeing,  and the posh shopping street. Both Salvatore Ferragamo and Gucci have museums, believe it or not. I feel we could give them a miss.

 

Today, Thursday, has been very full, but there’s just so much to see, and we do like to be thorough.

We started at the Medici chapels at San Lorenzo. Well, they did think a lot of themselves. The workmanship is very beautiful, with all the inlaid marble and and semiprecious stones, but the total effect is way over the top. And I’m concerned to say it, but I’m beginning to be more than a bit disillusioned with Michaelangelo. First, he didn’t seem to finish much; and second, it doesn’t look as if he’d ever seen a naked woman in his life. No one at all ever had breasts like “Night”. The figure of “Dusk” is better, though. And the statue of Guiliano is finished and good – hagiographic, but then it is a tomb and the family were paying!  Perhaps he saved the good stuff for Rome. I don’t remember feeling the same way there.

There’s also a lot of reliquaries, sometimes with recognisable body parts, and although the goldsmiths’ work is often incomparable, Phil really hates them. I find them gruesomely funny, which obviously isn’t what I’m meant to feel. They even have a whole mummified corpse on show in the church. In a glass case under the altar of course, but its discovery ended our tour rather abruptly.

Then we went on to the monastery of San Marco. Fra Angelico and others painted each cell; there is a crucifixion repeated in lots of the cells, with lots of blood, that I really wasn’t keen on, but also a beautiful, serene Annunciation, which I’m sure you would recognise. But the gripping bit was the glimpse into Dominican life in the fifteenth century. Talk about the past being another country – the Ellora caves seemed less weird. Or at any rate, no more weird.

The cloister

Savonarola was a Dominican, and they have various portraits of him, and the banner carried at Savonarola’s sermons. In a case, there are his rosary beads, and a belt and vest for the mortification of the flesh. The inscription was only in Italian, and I can’t now recall the exact word, so I can’t look it up, but they were covered with scratchy stuff next to the skin. It might be horsehair – I know that’s what Thomas More used – but the inscription  also added something about “spina di pesci”. Fishbones?  Whatever, the man was a dangerous fanatic. He was right about the Pope being corrupt, though, and that was why he was burned.

The heretical bell

They also have the bell which rang to let people know Savonarola was going to preach. After his fall, the bell – the bell!- was dragged through the city and flogged, and afterwards exiled out of the city. See what I mean about it being weird?

Next the Bargello. The building is well worth seeing in itself, with pretty pristine medieval ceilings.

 The museum is mostly sculpture. There’s an early Michaelangelo, of a drunken Bacchus, which I did like, but what they do have is a number of Cellinis. I don’t know why, exactly, but I just love his work. It’s so graceful, but full of life and energy, and he knows just what a naked woman looks like. His bust of Cosimo is wonderful, and not hagiographic – I can’t help feeling I would have had rather mixed feelings, if I’d been the sitter.

Upstairs they have two Donatellos which were fascinating in the contrast they provided. They’re both of David. The early one is an awkward mix of Gothic drapery and a classical style head; the second, later, one is pure renaissance. And all within a few years.  There’s lots of Della Robbias, and I can see the quality, but I’m afraid they don’t appeal. They won't let you take photos in the gallery, but in the courtyard was this fountain, from one of the Medici's gardens.

I thought you ought to see it. Just to add to its charms, the women spray water from their nipples, and the men from their penises.

Then, Santa Croce. I said it was a full day.

Santa Croce

The square is huge, and there were photos of the “calcio storico” which takes place in June. It seems a lot more organised than the Ashbourne  Shrove Tuesday  football match. Here, there are teams, medieval style football strips, a pitch, and it’s only men. In Ashbourne, everyone joins in, I’ve no idea how you know who is on each side, and the goals are at either end of the town, so something like a mile apart.

The church is also huge. It seems to be a sort of pantheon or Westminster Abbey for the great of Italy. So there are the tombs of Puccini, Michaelangelo, Ghiberti, a monument to Dante, although he’s not buried here, and Galileo. I hope he’d be alright with that, even though they used to burn heretics in the square outside. But I don’t think he thought of himself as heretical.

Santa Croce - cloister and campanile

There are frescos by Giotto,and a crucifixion by Cimabue, all in pretty poor shape – Santa Croce suffered really badly in the 1966 floods. But the cloisters are lovely. 

Phil, looking lost, in the colossal Pazzi chapel

The Pazzi chapel is amazing high renaissance. Unfortunately the Pazzis conspired against the Medicis, lost and fell, and the chapel was never properly completed. I don’t know where the Pazzis were buried, but it wasn’t in their chapel.

Finally, we wandered back to the hotel. We can’t go anywhere fast in Florence, there’s always too much to see.

   

Florence

Having had two highly successful out of season visit to tourist hotspots – we went to Venice in January and Rome in February – we’ve decided to visit Florence. I went to Florence in 1969. A friend from university and I flew to Milan and got the train back from Naples seven weeks later. We spent about five days in Florence. Phil went to Florence fifty years ago, on holiday with his parents.

We drove down to Stansted yesterday, as the flight to Pisa was early. All went well, although the airport was rammed – I can only suppose it’s normal on a Monday morning. Then we got the bus from Pisa airport to Florence. The hotel is in an old palazzo and about two minutes’ walk from the Duomo, and it’s got painted ceilings and stained glass and old bits of painted furniture, so we’re pleased.

We went straight off to the Duomo. We were seriously daunted by the crowds waiting to go in, and especially the queue for the ascent of the dome. Maybe March is too late to avoid the crowds. There are lots and lots of student groups, so perhaps it’s school trip time. They hang round in big, milling crowds, and it’s difficult to tell whether they are just hanging about, or queuing for something. 

Anyway, we went into the Duomo – but most of it is roped off, it’s sad. I suppose it doesn’t matter that much as there is not much specific to see inside the church, it’s the size and proportions that matter. But I would have liked to get a closer look at Uccello’s wall painting of Sir John Hawkwood. In 1969 I was surprised to see an English knight given pride of place in the cathedral, but I didn’t know anything much about him – really, I only knew he was a condottiero, and what condotierri were. But since then, I’ve read a biography, and he had a fascinating life.  It’s also quite funny – Florence paid him a pension, but that didn’t stop him attacking the city, because  someone else paid him more.

So then we plodded up the campanile – we can’t seem to resist a bell tower – and I say plodded, because it is pretty high, and because there are no handrails, so it’s really hard on the knees. My “good” knee – the one in its natural state –  felt fiery hot and pretty painful, so I have taken some ibruprofen and hope it settles down.

Christ Pancrator in the Baptistery

We went into the Baptistery – I don’t think it was open in 1969,  because I’d definitely have remembered it. The mosaics are wonderful. We loved them, and spent ages studying them. The “Gates of Paradise”, by Ghiberti, are now in the museum, and I regard that as a great improvement; I remember, in 1969, being quite excited to see them, having read all about their wonders, and being deeply disappointed.  But now, cleaned and restored, they deserve their name. There’s also very informative explanations of what biblical story is where on the panels, so you can identify the walls of Jericho and the Queen of Sheba and such like, and an interesting video on the restoration. We spent ages looking at those, too.

The "Gates of Paradise" - all clean and brilliant.

The Michaelangelo Pieta is also in the museum now. It used to be in the church, and I can’t quite see why it isn’t still there. I think it’s much more moving than the Pieta in St Peter’s even if it isn’t finished. 

On Tuesday we got up early and after a good breakfast in a wonderful dining room with a painted ceiling, went straight to the Duomo. The queue for the tour of the Dome was nonexistent, and we were able to walk in immediately. The lantern on the top of the dome is actually higher than the campanile, but some of the stairs had hand rails and also we had a long pause at the first gallery to look at the ceiling paintings, so it didn't seem nearly as tiring as the campanile.

The paintings follow a similar plan to the mosaics in the baptistery, so the lowest level is the final judgement. It’s fascinatingly gruesome. There are devils, some in animal form, others with tails, fearsome skull like features and long claws for fingernails, eating people, flaying them, buggering them with flaming spears, tossing them with pitchforks  - I could go on, but I can’t possibly do justice to the horribleness of it.

Devils, from the Baptistery. We couldn't photograph the ceiling of the dome, as there's a screen.

 There’s also Time, with his hourglass, Cerberus and the Hydra (not sure how they got in on the act), and a cheerful, skeletal death, with a sword not a scythe. Further up there’s a small depiction of the faithful going into paradise, but that concept obviously didn’t arouse the same fevered creativity as the idea of Hell.

As you go up there’s Mary, and Jesus in glory, lots of saints and popes;  maybe saints who were popes, who knows. But it’s the Last Judgement that’s so terrific. The way up the Dome and round the two galleries is pretty narrow, so it’s difficult to pass anyone, but there are short bits where you can stand and stare. We stared for ages. I’m afraid we wouldn’t have looked for half so long if the paintings had been all of saints and angels. It’s really quite hard to comprehend what effect visions like these had on the ordinary Christian. We know what effect they had on fanatics, unfortunately.

There are a lot of stairs up to the lantern, but we made it easily, and the views are superb, well worth the effort, even without getting close up to the dome paintings.

The campanile, from the lantern of the dome.

When we got down we had a long sit and an iced tea, and then I did some shopping. It’s funny, in France I’m never remotely tempted by anything in clothes shops, but I knew I’d be tempted in Italy, and so it proved. So I have two knitted cotton tops, a pair of two tone brogues, and a red satchel. I’ve been fancying a satchel for ages for city sightseeing.

A view from the lantern of the dome.

Then we went to the city market, and had lunch of crispy fried squid and pieces of cod, with a helping of chips, sitting along the front of a fish stall while one of the owners did the cooking and the other prepared squid and sold the raw fish.  It was jolly good.

We had pre booked tickets for the Accademia, and were glad that we had when we saw the queue. There’s a lot of early religious painting, but the one Giotto is on loan, so it’s really the David people go to see. There are also some unfinished Michaelangelo sculptures, which were very interesting. What’s that saying, supposedly by Michaelangelo  - “I saw the angel in the stone and carved until I set him free”, or something, and it was thrilling seeing the figures emerging from the stone.

The David is very well displayed, but I just can’t warm to it. The right hand is enormous and the left hand and head are too big. The body and legs are great, but it’s nowhere near as appealing to me as I feel it ought to be. But after all, it’s my opinion. 

The naughtiest dog in Nottingham

 Soon after we moved to the city centre, we found that one pleasant walk is to go along the footpath above Newcastle Drive, which gives you splendid views of The Park, and indeed over to Radcliffe on Soar and even, on clear days, the control tower of East Midlands airport. Then you cross Canning Circus and walk down through the General Cemetery, cross the road, go up through the Arboretum, and then return to Canning Circus on different paths.

The view from the footpath

I got really interested in the General Cemetery. There are lots of intriguing graves, including one of the directors of the cemetery company, who was also one of the first burials, having drowned on the Forfarshire, the ship wrecked on the Farne Islands. He wasn’t one of the passengers who survived long enough to be rescued by Grace Darling and her father, and was only identified by the laundry marks on his clothes. He was doubly unlucky, as his parents had christened him Daft Smith Churchill. 

Daft Smith Churchill's grave

I have a lot to say about some of the weirder names bestowed by misguided parents nowadays, but Victorian parents weren’t much more thoughtful. There’s a Nettleship, a couple of Hephzibahs and a Pharaoh. I presume some of the odd names had to do with the chance of an inheritance. It would take a lot of money to make up for being landed with a name like Daft.

There’s also “the Queen’s Jester” – a sort of Victorian Max Miller, as far as I can make out - the authoress of “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”,  a promising cricketer who was killed at Lord’s by being hit on the head by a cricket ball, and one I just can’t find – a Polish Anglican vicar of Greasley, who appears in D.H.Lawrence’s “The Rainbow”. Apparently –I haven’t read it.  I can’t stand Lawrence. He’s such a misogynist. We had to study “Sons and Lovers” for A Level, and it wasn’t a good book to study. The more you studied it, the more you disliked it.

So the other day I took youngest son’s puppy, Atlas, for a walk through the cemetery and Arboretum. It’s about time he learned to come back when called, so I let him off the lead in the bandstand enclosure, with the gates firmly closed. He had a brilliant time fetching sticks, and then I decided it was time to go.

Well, could I catch the wretched animal! He obviously thought it was all the most brilliant game. Trying to grab him didn’t work. Treats didn’t work. Sitting still and hoping he got bored didn’t work. Eventually, I thought that if I went out of the gate, he would follow, and if I only opened it a crack, I’d be able to grab him. So I went out. He followed – he doesn’t want to lose you, he just doesn’t want to go on the lead. I left the gate open a little bit and grabbed for him. It was like trying to grab a greased piglet. So now he was loose in the Arboretum, and the gates are open to the road and the trams are going up and down the road.

The naughtiest dog in Nottingham

I didn’t dare move towards the gate, and he was still teasing me by standing still, quite close to me, and then hurtling off like a rocket when I moved any nearer. Then Atlas tried to make friends with a biggish white dog on a lead. It is a cross between a Staffordshire Bull and a Boxer, his nice owner  told me, and he also told me about his other dogs, because we had plenty of time to have quite a long conversation, although by this time I was seriously having to watch my language. Anyway the nice bloke tried to help me catch Atlas, but neither of us could manage it. “He’s fast, isn’t he?” Yes. He’s lightning fast, and he’s grinning all over his face and having the time of his life and when I do finally catch him………………………………………………………………..

In the end the big dog knocked Atlas over and pinned him down, but unfortunately let go too soon and both of us humans ended up grabbing at nothing. Atlas wasn’t a bit put off by this, but I felt I had better take him away before we had serious trouble. I thought that, if I went towards the pond, he might just get sufficiently interested in the ducks for me to grab him.

But all at once he seemed to get tired - between stress and running around, I was worn out - and flopped down on the grass. I really thought he was teasing me and would wriggle out of my grip at the last moment, but as I slowly approached he stayed still and let me grab his harness. Thank God and all the saints in Heaven! I don’t have to try to explain how I lost his dog to my son!

Phil, in The Arboretum with Atlas

I shall take him a walk again, because Atlas is nice company (and for any young man who wants to meet girls, let me tell you, I can’t think of a better method than walking a puppy), but that is the very last time I let him off the lead.