On the Move - Italy (6 of 23) - Duomo!
Sep. 6th, 2001 03:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetUp early, we made the 8:30am train in Montevarchi and headed in to Florence for a very full day. We started at the Duomo, touring the inside first. The nave is fairly plain...it's the dome everyone comes to see. The inside of it is painted by Vasari to display the judgement of humanity, with devils torturing the damned around the base, up to saints looking out from paradise over a painted balustrade just below the lantern at the top of the dome. There are a couple of major cracks in the dome, which studies determined were caused not by structural forces or earthquakes, but by the vibration from the huge volume of heavy trucks travelling through the piazza, which has now been closed to all but very limited traffic.
After seeing it from ground level, we were eager to get up there, so we went around to the separate entrance and climbed all four hundred sixty-three steps. It wasn't a bad climb, really, although complicated by various sections where people were trying to get up and down the same narrow stairs at the same time. There are two galleries around the interior of the dome, providing an opportunity to get a closer look at Vasari's figures and have a view of the cathedral below.
One of Brunelleschi's innovations was to construct two domes, a thicker inner one and a thinner outer one. After moving around the first gallery, the path leads out between the domes, where the structural elements, particularly the ribs and the herringbone pattern of the bricks, are visible. Finally we reached the top of the dome and walked the circuit around the lantern, admiring the view and identifying landmarks around town. From up there, the universality of red tile roofs is very apparent. We had a lovely view of the campanile, or bell tower, next to the Duomo and of the various palazzi.
After getting a passing tourist to take our picture (actually, two, because the first one didn't manage to get a shot with Jason's camera, so we switched to mine) with all of Florence behind us, we headed down the steps. There was no one with us on the way down, which was more pleasant than the line on the way up. The first stage involves walking right down the curve of the inner dome. Among the plentiful graffitti throughout the dome was one I really liked, "Brunelleschi is Magic!"
Back on the ground, we grabbed pannnini on the way to the Galleria dell'Accademia. There we lucked onto a special exhibit on music in the Medici court, including a display of various instruments unfamiliar to our modern eyes (the snake, the trumpet fiddle, the piano-guitar) and a violin said to be the only Stradivarius not modified over the intervening ages. After seeing that area, we moved back into the main sections of the gallery and saw more early religious paintings and the star of the place, Michelangelo's "David." They also have four unfinished pieces of his, as well as some Mannerist works and a room full of 19th century sculpture. "David" really is stunning. As you turn into the hall, it dominates the room completely. I had not realized that he is nine meters tall...the copy out in the Piazza della Signoria doesn't seem nearly as big, but inside David becomes Goliath.
From there we walked back to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. The Opera was the municipal office responsible for all the work done on the cathedral. Over the years they have become the repository for various pieces removed during changes to the facade and, more recently, for protection from the pollution that has damaged them so severely. We saw a Michelangelo pieta including a portrayal of himself as Nicodemus that was intended for his tomb, but was unfinished and never made it there. We saw a whole bunch of reliquaries with different saints' supposed bits in them. One of the real highlights was the collected drawings of different proposals for the facade of the Duomo. The original architect had left the face 2/3 finished and by the time they got around to completing it, tastes had changed and they wanted something different. There were various competitions and political machinations to choose a new plan, but the facade was not actually completed until the late 19th century.
By the time we left the museum, we were getting kind of tired. When we realized that Orsanmichele would reopen in twenty minutes, we decided to pause there and wait for it. The Foot Locker on the main street from the Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria had a convenient ledge outside its windows, so we sat there and wrote postcards until the church reopened. There's been a church on this site off and on since 750. For a while the building was a grain market with a miraculous fresco of the Virgin Mary on one of its columns. It was re-purposed as a church again over the turn of the 15th century and decorated with statues by Verrocchio, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, among others. Most of those statues have been removed from their exterior niches, although some have been replaced with copies. Half of the nave was closed off for renovations, but they have recently finished cleaning and restoring the gloriously ornate marble tabernacle by Andrea Orcagna and the lovely "Madonna and Child" altarpiece painted by Bardardo Daddi in 1347. Our visit there was fairly quick and then we headed on to the Piazza della Signoria in a second attempt to visit the Palazzo Vecchio. The published hours were 9am until 7pm Tuesday, Friday and Saturday and 9am until 11pm on Monday and Wednesday. We had missed that it is closed on Sundays and Thursdays, and so were again thwarted.
We took advantage of the post office in the Uffizi to buy stamps and mail a first batch of postcards and then wandered over to Santa Croce. Probably designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, architect of the Duomo, the church was begun in 1294 and finished in 1450. It contains the graves of nearly 300 eminent Florentines including Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. Michaelangelo's tomb was sadly given over to Vasari--perpetrator of all sorts of heinous artistic acts including the whitewashing of frescoes in churches all over Florence in the name of renovation--but it's still nifty to see it. More modern tombs include those of Enrico Fermi and radio pioneer Marconi. The frescoes here are by Giotto, among others, and are very impressive.
One of the things I have been enjoying about this trip is the chance to develop an appreciation for Italian Renaissance art. Religious icons and miles of frescoes can be a bit overwhelming, but it is nice to have images to go along with names that have floated through my reading and education. We all know Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, but it can be hard to keep the Lippis, della Robbias and Ghirlandaios apart, especially when more than one member of a family was an artist. Getting to see all of these works and begin to have tastes and opinions on them and connections with personal experiences is a wonderful education.
We left the church at 5:30, hoping to make it into the Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce next door, but they had already closed their ticket office. At loose ends, we sat on the steps of the church for an hour, writing postcards adn watching the vendors of the square packing up for the night.
Jason had three suggestions for dinner in the area, so we tracked those down and checked out their menus and ambience before settling on the Trattoria Baldovino. We split an order of bruschetta with prosciutto and chanterelles, my favorite mushrooms, and then a plate of gnocchi sorrentina (with tomato sauce and mozzarella). For our entree we decided to try the traditional bistecca Fiorentina, an enormous T-bone (in this case, 1.2 kg) grilled and served rare. We had a green salad on the side, to give us something to switch off to. The desserts looked so good that we decided we had enough room to split a slice of apple pie made with raisins and pine nuts and drenched in warm custard. A couple of cappucinos gave us the boost we needed to roll back to the train station on the other side of town to catch our train back to Montevarchi for the night.
Next, a day off...
After seeing it from ground level, we were eager to get up there, so we went around to the separate entrance and climbed all four hundred sixty-three steps. It wasn't a bad climb, really, although complicated by various sections where people were trying to get up and down the same narrow stairs at the same time. There are two galleries around the interior of the dome, providing an opportunity to get a closer look at Vasari's figures and have a view of the cathedral below.
One of Brunelleschi's innovations was to construct two domes, a thicker inner one and a thinner outer one. After moving around the first gallery, the path leads out between the domes, where the structural elements, particularly the ribs and the herringbone pattern of the bricks, are visible. Finally we reached the top of the dome and walked the circuit around the lantern, admiring the view and identifying landmarks around town. From up there, the universality of red tile roofs is very apparent. We had a lovely view of the campanile, or bell tower, next to the Duomo and of the various palazzi.
After getting a passing tourist to take our picture (actually, two, because the first one didn't manage to get a shot with Jason's camera, so we switched to mine) with all of Florence behind us, we headed down the steps. There was no one with us on the way down, which was more pleasant than the line on the way up. The first stage involves walking right down the curve of the inner dome. Among the plentiful graffitti throughout the dome was one I really liked, "Brunelleschi is Magic!"
Back on the ground, we grabbed pannnini on the way to the Galleria dell'Accademia. There we lucked onto a special exhibit on music in the Medici court, including a display of various instruments unfamiliar to our modern eyes (the snake, the trumpet fiddle, the piano-guitar) and a violin said to be the only Stradivarius not modified over the intervening ages. After seeing that area, we moved back into the main sections of the gallery and saw more early religious paintings and the star of the place, Michelangelo's "David." They also have four unfinished pieces of his, as well as some Mannerist works and a room full of 19th century sculpture. "David" really is stunning. As you turn into the hall, it dominates the room completely. I had not realized that he is nine meters tall...the copy out in the Piazza della Signoria doesn't seem nearly as big, but inside David becomes Goliath.
From there we walked back to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. The Opera was the municipal office responsible for all the work done on the cathedral. Over the years they have become the repository for various pieces removed during changes to the facade and, more recently, for protection from the pollution that has damaged them so severely. We saw a Michelangelo pieta including a portrayal of himself as Nicodemus that was intended for his tomb, but was unfinished and never made it there. We saw a whole bunch of reliquaries with different saints' supposed bits in them. One of the real highlights was the collected drawings of different proposals for the facade of the Duomo. The original architect had left the face 2/3 finished and by the time they got around to completing it, tastes had changed and they wanted something different. There were various competitions and political machinations to choose a new plan, but the facade was not actually completed until the late 19th century.
By the time we left the museum, we were getting kind of tired. When we realized that Orsanmichele would reopen in twenty minutes, we decided to pause there and wait for it. The Foot Locker on the main street from the Duomo to the Piazza della Signoria had a convenient ledge outside its windows, so we sat there and wrote postcards until the church reopened. There's been a church on this site off and on since 750. For a while the building was a grain market with a miraculous fresco of the Virgin Mary on one of its columns. It was re-purposed as a church again over the turn of the 15th century and decorated with statues by Verrocchio, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Luca della Robbia, among others. Most of those statues have been removed from their exterior niches, although some have been replaced with copies. Half of the nave was closed off for renovations, but they have recently finished cleaning and restoring the gloriously ornate marble tabernacle by Andrea Orcagna and the lovely "Madonna and Child" altarpiece painted by Bardardo Daddi in 1347. Our visit there was fairly quick and then we headed on to the Piazza della Signoria in a second attempt to visit the Palazzo Vecchio. The published hours were 9am until 7pm Tuesday, Friday and Saturday and 9am until 11pm on Monday and Wednesday. We had missed that it is closed on Sundays and Thursdays, and so were again thwarted.
We took advantage of the post office in the Uffizi to buy stamps and mail a first batch of postcards and then wandered over to Santa Croce. Probably designed by Arnolfo di Cambio, architect of the Duomo, the church was begun in 1294 and finished in 1450. It contains the graves of nearly 300 eminent Florentines including Galileo, Michelangelo and Machiavelli. Michaelangelo's tomb was sadly given over to Vasari--perpetrator of all sorts of heinous artistic acts including the whitewashing of frescoes in churches all over Florence in the name of renovation--but it's still nifty to see it. More modern tombs include those of Enrico Fermi and radio pioneer Marconi. The frescoes here are by Giotto, among others, and are very impressive.
One of the things I have been enjoying about this trip is the chance to develop an appreciation for Italian Renaissance art. Religious icons and miles of frescoes can be a bit overwhelming, but it is nice to have images to go along with names that have floated through my reading and education. We all know Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, but it can be hard to keep the Lippis, della Robbias and Ghirlandaios apart, especially when more than one member of a family was an artist. Getting to see all of these works and begin to have tastes and opinions on them and connections with personal experiences is a wonderful education.
We left the church at 5:30, hoping to make it into the Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce next door, but they had already closed their ticket office. At loose ends, we sat on the steps of the church for an hour, writing postcards adn watching the vendors of the square packing up for the night.
Jason had three suggestions for dinner in the area, so we tracked those down and checked out their menus and ambience before settling on the Trattoria Baldovino. We split an order of bruschetta with prosciutto and chanterelles, my favorite mushrooms, and then a plate of gnocchi sorrentina (with tomato sauce and mozzarella). For our entree we decided to try the traditional bistecca Fiorentina, an enormous T-bone (in this case, 1.2 kg) grilled and served rare. We had a green salad on the side, to give us something to switch off to. The desserts looked so good that we decided we had enough room to split a slice of apple pie made with raisins and pine nuts and drenched in warm custard. A couple of cappucinos gave us the boost we needed to roll back to the train station on the other side of town to catch our train back to Montevarchi for the night.
Next, a day off...
