Napoleon slept here, too?

Massive and brutish, the Palazzo Pitti was original built as a home for the Florentine banker, Lucas Pitti in 1458, later purchased and enlarged by the Medicis, and from then on it was the seat of Florentine power until it was turned into a museum in 1919. Even Napoleon Bonaparte used it as his Italian palace; his royal bathroom and tub is displayed in all its glory.

Once inside, the museum wasn't as imposing as it looked from the outside. The rooms (former bed chambers, sitting rooms, billiard rooms and the like) are smallish for a museum and the paintings are hung salon style. Each room has very clear descriptions of the paintings, so moving through is actually fun and informative.

Above is the Venus Room with this stellar Titian Portrait of a Young Woman (below). It is the same model he also used for his famous Venus of Urbino (in the Uffizi Museum, Florence).

Titian's Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi.

The Boboli Gardens are out back. "Gardens" is a bit of an understatement, it's a huge park meant, I can only imagine, to be traversed by horse and buggy.

The view from the start of the Boboli Garden looking at the back door of the Pitti.

There are a few curiosities in the garden, such as this grotto by the artist Giambologna. Two of of Michelangelo's prisoners were jammed into the darn thing at one point, but someone wisely decided to remove them and leave copies.

My walk home from the Palazzo Pitti at half past noon was a very different than my walk there at eight in the morning. In these two photos of the Ponte Vecchio that I crossed on the way to and from the Palazzo Pitti, see if you can tell how it was different.

How many ways to...

Like the old adage about Eskimos having many words for snow, the Italians have many words for restaurants. Here are a few of them:

"Ristorante" (this one near my apartment not only has great food, it also has 60s era modern decor. Looks like some Italian places in the States, unusual for Florence).

"Trattoria" is a traditional sit-down restaurant, same as a "restaurante," usually family owned and operated. If there are chain restaurants in Florence (besides the occasional McDonalds), they are well disguised.

A "Bar" is not a drinking establishment, it is a snack-bar with stand at the counter espresso, sweet rolls for breakfast, and sandwiches for lunch. Sometimes a few small tables. There is one on almost every corner. When I first arrived I thought it was the land of pubs. Turns out there are very few pubs and they are for tourists or students.

Then there are combinations that can't quite make up their minds.

"Rosticceria" is for take-out and has been commandeered by the foreign take-out communities.

"Pizzerias" are not what you expect. They are sit down restaurants, trattorias really, that also offer pizzas. Oddly, a plain cheese pizza in Italy is called a Margherita.

Then there are official "Tabacchis" which are snack-bars that also sell cigarettes, bus tickets, postage stamps, and lottery tickets.

Ain't No Balonie.

The city of Bologna, when I was a youngster, was just some place whose namesake got plopped between two slices of Wonder Bread. Two days ago, I was speeding on a train preparing to plop down in Bologna.

The main train station in Bologna was the site of a neo-Nazi bombing in 1980 that killed many people.

I walked for a mile under long protective porticoes down a busy main street.

The handsome medieval center of Bologna, Piazza Maggiore, is commandeered by the world's fifth largest church, the Basilica of San Petronio.

But I wasn't looking for "more old art in old churches," here. Instead, I was headed for the museum of a 20th C. painter who I have admired for almost thirty years, Giorgio Morandi (more about Morandi below). After spending the morning in rapture with Morandi's work, I continued by train on to Padua to take in another great Giotto fresco cycle at the Arena Chapel.

Bizarre is the only way to describe entering the chapel to see the Giottos. The folks at the Arena Chapel had provided, by phone, a 3 o'clock appointment. Tickets were to be picked up one hour before the appointed time, then I had to appear at the entrance exactly five minutes early.

Twenty five people (including myself) were then led into a sealed environmentally controlled room (with hissing StarTrek like doors) for education and decontamination! In exactly fifteen minutes, the interior doors hissed open and we were led into the barrel vaulted chapel to view Giotto's paintings. The doors hissed closed behind us.

In another fifteen minutes, a chime sounded, the doors hissed back open, and we were promptly escorted out. That was it, fifteen minutes decontaminating, fifteen minutes in the chapel. Hardly time to scan the frescoes. Ah, but still, a once in a lifetime event for a painter.

On Morandi:

The signature bleached color in Morandi paintings could be derived directly from the weathered frescoes so prominent and beautiful throughout italy.

Andrea del Sarto fresco


Giorgio Morandi oil painting

The bottles and jars in his paintings have the solidness and stability of a Giotto...

and the contemplative dignity of a Fra Angelico.

At the same time, Morandi was a modernist who absorbed the twentieth century's fetish for flatness and enjoyed the tension between the illusion of space and the hard fact of the picture plane.

Morandi's vision was as steeped in tradition as the city of Bologna, and as modern as a bologna sandwich.

Night in Florence.

"Enchanting" may be too romantic and cliché a word to use for Florence by night, but it is its own world after dark. The busier roads take on a more cosmopolitan air, it's dramatically lit monuments become grander, and its quiet narrow streets become the ghosts of their medieval past. Here are some photos and you can decide whether "enchanting" fits.

The Duomo's campanile at dusk (click photos to enlarge).

Busy Via Cavour on a misty night.




Street vendor by electric light.




Venders closing shops near Santa Croche.




Palazzo Vecchio and full moon.




Walking home.

And a parade of food vendors after shutting on a rainy winter night in Florence.

Heroics

Michelangelo (1475 - 1564) was not the first artist to sculpt a nude David during the Renaissance. That honor belongs to Donatello (c. 1386 – 1466), whose bronze David was the first stand-alone nude male sculpted since antiquity. You may not be familiar with Donatello, but he was the quintessential early renaissance artist and laid the groundwork for the later Michelangelo (among many).

Click to see larger image.

Donatello's David, which I saw yesterday in Florence's Bargello Museum, is shocking when you consider it was made barely out of the middle ages when art was mostly a means for the Catholic Church to portray its great stories. It is an effeminate nude adolescent boy, standing with a cocked hip and one foot on the severed head of Goliath, a sword in one hand, his other holding a stone, and on his flowing locks is a girly hat with garlands and ribbons.

But it is was also Donatello's St. George, commissioned for the sword makers guild, that must have been an inspiration for the determined, but vulnerable expression of Michelangelo's heroic nude David.

Mamamiya!

After a high speed train, then a regional train, a bus lurched up mountain switchbacks to finally drop Stacy and I in the center of Roccagorga, an obscure but quintessential hilltop village southwest of Rome. Hoping to make contact with some of Stacy's relatives, we arrived with photos and a list of distant cousins, but no phone numbers or addresses. Only half expecting to find anyone, it looked like a quiet two days before we headed back to Florence. WRONG!

Not long after showing a shop owner a few photos, we were swept up in a frenzy. For the next 36 hours we were wined, dined, toted about, introduced to cousins galore, and even serenaded by Orasmo, the head of the clan (see video)!



Here is what we (with a dozen relatives joining) had for meal at cousin Gilda's house on our second day:

Wine (home made)
Prosciutto (home made)
Sausage (home made)
Salami (home made)
Pecorino cheese
Mozzarella cheese
Olives
Bread
Pasta with meat sauce
Grilled Artichokes
Omelette
Salad
Fava beans
Cookies
Scotch
Grappa
Coffee

Oh, yeah, that was lunch!

Galileo - A "guest post" by Stacy

We spent this afternoon walking the streets of Florence, in search of Galileo. And we met with SUCCESS.

GALILEO'S LEGACY
Galileo gave us telescopes, the moons of Jupiter, and the Principle of Inertia. For some reason, he also gave us the finger (though I do not believe this was his intention).

GALILEO, A HERO OF SCIENCE (note arrow)




GALILEO'S FINGER - WHY?




THE HOUSE WHERE GALILEO AND HIS FINGER LIVED

Venice

Venice is a unique and beautiful city. Stacy, Christian (Stacy's brother), Mike (Christian's friend), and I arrived in Venice close to noon. We purchased our return train tickets before leaving the station, and at the exit we stepped directly into a vaporetto, one of the many water-buses that ungainly motor up and down Grand Canal, Venice's main thorough-fare.




Our first stop is Piazza San Marco. After the gauntlet of trinket and souvenir stands, we let the steady current of tourists carry us to the piazza. Stacy happens to glance at our hastily picked up return train tickets to discover that we had the wrong ones! A troubled tour around the piazza and we decide to take the vaporetto back to the train station to get proper tickets.



Here we are at the train station wrestling with the ticket machine.



Ah, finally the correct ticket!



With new tickets safely safely in hand, our few hours in Venice shortened considerably, we board another vaporetto and head for our second destination, lunch.



After pizza and beer on a lovely quiet piazza, we go to the Scuola di S.Rocco where we find ourselves surrounded by enormous dark and turbulent Tintoretto paintings that cover every conceivable biblical episode from Adam and Eve through the Resurrection.




Next door in the Church of Santa Maria Bloridosa dei Frari the mood is relieved by a couple of Titian and Bellini altarpieces that are full of light.



A short stroll and a few snaps of the camera and we head for the vaporetto and begin our trip back to Florence.

Still not the high season, Venice was swamped with tourists. Ok, so I suffer from the tourist malaise of finding more like myself. But unlike Florence or Rome, where tourism becomes an integral part of much larger working cities, Venice seems like a shopping mall emptied of anything real beyond its tourist trade. Its beautiful architecture, intense art, and lovely canals seem like nothing but stage props for gawkers and shoppers. Or as one colleague put it, Venice is like a graveyard.