Wanderung 19

Meandering the Mediterranean

Bus Trip from Rome to Venice

April - May 2009

Thursday, April 23th, 2009: Florence, Italy

Bob:

We started off the day with a short bus ride down to a plaza near the River Arno. Walking down to the riverbank, we followed the shoreline in toward the center of the city, in the direction of the Ponte Vecchio. We turned in toward the city before that bridge, however, to get to the Plaza Sante Croce, home, naturally enough, of the Sante Croce church. The church itself looked modest enough, at least by the standards of the huge cathedral in Florence that we saw later, but my goodness what a lot of famous Renaissance men were buried there including Dante, Macchiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo. A statue of Dante Allegheri anchored one corner of the plaza in front of the church, and he looked rather glum, but that might have been simply because it was a gloomy day and rain was threatening to fall.

Our walking tour started at the Peruzzi leather factory where we saw a demonstration of embossing a gilt pattern onto a leather surface, in that case a leather waste paper basket. I had no idea that they used a hot iron to kind of melt it into the leather. Although Peruzzi is primarily a leather goods store, the display shelves in the demonstration area included a lot of nice leather, wood, and metal craft pieces. The demonstration just required a few minutes, but we were given over a half an hour to shop, and I finally broke down and bought a nice leather belt and one of those folding leather waste paper baskets that had come from the demonstration.

Our local guide joined us to give a "walk and talk" tour that lasted for an hour or so. Starting at the plaza, we walked in through streets filled with marvelous architecture until we came to the Cathedral or Duomo. The outside was fantastically complex, almost to the point of being like a gingerbread house except that it was huge and all carved out of solid stone. Off to one side was the tall, square-shaped spire of the bell tower. It also had carved statues at the base, arches, and beautiful stonework.


 

In front of the Duomo in the Plaza de San Giovanni we found the baptistery building, and it featured a truly remarkable set of gilded doors called the "Key of Heaven" doors. Each panel of the ten panels on the doors was a sculptured vignette from some tale in the bible in high bas-relief and plated with gold. The detail on the sculptures was simply amazing as was the remarkable state of preservation of all the tiny details. My best guess about the seemingly perfect preservation was that the gold plating was a good protective surface even against modern air pollution and acidic rain (expensive, though!).


 

The walking tour ended in the Plaza Della Signoria, where we stopped to have lunch at one of about 6 restaurants ringing the plaza. Each restaurant had marked off a space in the plaza for al fresco dining that had their particular tables, chairs and decorations. We picked the restaurant "Il David", (By [the statue of] David), pretty much at random because we were all hungry and Phyllis, in particular, had been walking enough that her knee was hurting badly and she needed to sit down. We were close enough to the exit from the Uffizi art gallery that we could take photos of some of the marble statues on display there, so we had an al fresco lunch with second-to-none scenery.


 

Lois, Monika, and I left Phyllis comfortably ensconced with dessert while we explored the Ponte Vecchio just a couple of blocks South on the Arno River. The bridge gave us nice views upstream and downstream, but as far as I could tell the stores located on the bridge contained nothing but overpriced jewelry shops. We headed off to revisit the Duomo, where I took some more pictures as that is hard to do in a group sometimes. Lois was worried about Phyllis, so Monika and she went back to check on her while I took yet another picture, but then Monika and I failed to reconnect afterwards and spent the next couple of hours searching for each other.

I oscillated between the Duomo and the Plaza Della Signoria, walking the route several times looking for any of the three of them and getting more and more frustrated. Meanwhile, Lois and Phyllis had already taken a cab back to the hotel. Monika was late back to our meeting place, stopped for five minutes, and then hared off in the direction she thought I would be going, which was back to the hotel, looking for me en route. I finally gave up and walked back to the hotel, where we did finally reconnect. Fortunately we still had time that afternoon to retrace our steps to the Galleria del Accademia where we saw Michelangelo's sculpture of King David.

The statue of David was magnificent and seemed flawless except maybe for some erosion abound the toes. That is remarkable given that it sat outside for almost four centuries until it was brought to an inside display in 1907. In the sculpture, David is clearly left-handed as he is holding the base of the sling with his left hand, and sling throwers would always use their dominant hand for the maximum power. Michelangelo was also left-handed, so that raises the issue of whether he used himself as a model, which may have been the case as he was only 26 when he received the commission for the statue. If so, Michelangelo was also one of the minority of humans whose second toe is longer than the big toe, because that is clearly true on the statue of David. On close inspection I also wondered if his hands were unnaturally large, but Monika and I finally figured out that the hands were to scale and we were just a victim of the foreshortening effect, just like when you view Lincoln's hands up close at the Lincoln Monument in Washington, D.C.

Another room in the Galleria del Accademia contained more sculptures, all of them quite nice, and a lot of plaster models from various sculptures. The latter displays included row upon row of heads, all different, and seeing all those heads of people cheek by jowl, so to speak, was curious. The plaster models had iron bars or something in them, possibly for reinforcement because plaster is so much weaker than stone, I guess. Still, it was interesting to get a peek at the steps in the process to a finished sculpture because I had never really seen anything like that before.

By dinner time I was pretty tired as I had walked more miles than I had planned on during the day. But dinner in the hotel was one of the two dinners included on our Cosmos tour, and I couldn't pass up a "free" meal! As it turned out, we had a nice time chatting with a couple of women from California and a father-and-son pair from Australia. The father was originally from Malta, however, and so we chatted amiably about Valetta, the capital of Malta, and the church of the Knights Templar there. Malta is an arid, sunny island with a long history. The church, for example, houses the remarkable tombs of the old knights dating back to medieval times. It's an extraordinary and unique edifice that we saw on our cruise around Italy during Wanderung 10, and discussing it with out table mates brought back fond memories of that trip.

Copyright 2009 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Index
Prolog Map of Transatlantic Cruise Map of Northern Italian Bus Trip Map of Eastern Mediterranean Cruise Epilog

April 2009
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