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.