rushthatspeaks

So I have filled out all the paperwork I can possibly fill out for an apartment that, while not the epitome of perfection, is completely fine (it has only three problems: available March 1 instead of in February, farther from T than I would like in an ideal world, bathroom very very small; on the other hand the rooms are sized such that I think it is the only two-bedroom I've ever seen where we can shelve all our books because it is that roomy, and it's in one of those lovely old Victorians which, contrary to all human expectation, has actually been adequately maintained forever). Therefore we probably have an apartment, but it's not up to me anymore, it's up to other people to fill out paperwork and the landlord to approve stuff and whatnot, and so I am on a train back to B.'s.

Train boring. Too sleep-deprived to read, and man, if I am too tired for Clark Ashton Smith I am impressively tired. In quiet car, as I hoped I'd sleep, but train too jouncy to sleep. Internet veeeeeeeeeeeery sloooooooow. (Though extant.) Experiencing bizarre combination of fear of not getting apartment and fear of potential renter's remorse. (It's probably fine! I know this!)

So yeah have a music guessing meme, One of those first-line-of-song ones, the first twenty that come up at random on my tiny alien control device, and I'll leave out the foreign-language ones and elide any instances of the song title in the quoted lyrics. And doing this should get me through the rest of New Jersey, even if New Jersey seems infinite. My wife did this recently and it will probably be illustrative of the difference in our tastes, though I expect she'll still know all of them.

( cut for those of you who aren't interested )

The Worst Books I Reviewed, Where I Mean Worst In The Bad Way

-- David Lindsay, Devil's Tor. Oh, David Lindsay. I will always love and respect you. EXCEPT FOR THIS BOOK GAH. Surprise!unintentional!Nazis are never a good thing.
-- Loretta Chase, Don't Tempt Me. Horrific Orientalist fiddle-faddle. I could have been much nastier to this than I was.

The Worst Books I Reviewed, Where By Worst I Mean Most Hilarious

-- Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Crazy Beautiful. Thinking about this book will never not be funny. Never. ALL THE ANGST! Mahogany and topaz are the same color!
-- John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden. I was not expecting the alien orchid tentacle porn. Because honestly, I am never expecting that.
-- Louis Rodrigues, A Long Time Waiting. If I ever have to fight a duel with bad poetry, this is the book I'm bringing to use as a weapon.
-- Frank Miller, 300. ... sometimes you just need to break out the caps-lock.

I Am Still So Blazingly Ambivalent About This Book, Seriously

-- Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey.

The Reviews I Enjoyed Writing The Most

Well, I mean, I desperately enjoyed everything in the hilariously bad category, but also:

-- Opal Whiteley ed. Benjamin Hoff, The Singing Creek Where The Willows Grow. You don't get material like this to work with every day. A confusing joy of an experience.
-- Patrick O'Brian, Master and Commander, + Lady Sarashina, Sarashina Nikki: the numerical mixup which caused me to read an extra book was perfectly real, and I still think this was a good way of dealing with it.
-- Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate. From about halfway through the book it was obvious how the review needed to work, and I took a while to become reconciled to it, but then it was fun.
-- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy. A liberation. I had stayed up so late and read so hard that I was basically high-- incredibly loopy, randomly giggly-- and for some reason the book makes me think in French, so I was having to translate every sentence into English as I wrote it down, and that was when I realized that I had no particular obligation to go into details on the plot, historical background, etc., and what's more the review would be better if I didn't. This improved later reviews immensely both for me and for everyone else.
-- Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. This is a case of me talking to myself about a book and figuring it out as I go, and I'm happy with where it ended up because the vast majority of other reviews I'd seen didn't have much to do with the text as I read it.
-- Pat Conroy, Prince of Tides.

The Review I Just Kind Of Wrote Down And Then Everyone Told Me It Was Really Good And Okay, I Do See It Now You Mention

-- T.H. White, The Goshawk.

The Reviews I Wish I'd Done Better:

Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes; both Patrick Rothfuss reviews; M. John Harrison, Light. Did not adequately express the goodness of the books involved. Michele Jaffe, The Story of 0; was having one of those days where you forget information you know perfectly well and then people have to remind you of it in comments; can't imagine where I put my brain.

My dear friend rachelmanija is having a read-a-thon to raise money so she can go to Japan on an academic trip which sounds, frankly, awesome. Since I don't have any money, I'm offering to read and review books if you donate to her trip fund.

The rules:

1) If you want to sign up for Rachel to read a book, sign up on her journal. If you want to sign up for me to read a book, sign up on my journal in the comments of this entry (either LJ or DW). SIGNUPS FOR ME AND FOR RACHEL ARE SEPARATE.

2) I will read up to four books for this-- the first two signups on LJ and the first two signups on DW. This is my maximum due to current life circumstances. This means-- note that this is different from Rachel's rules-- one book per person, first-come first-served. I will then review the book in question here on my blog after I read it. You can either request a specific book, or do a more general request such as 'I want you to read a silly YA AU of Shakespeare' or 'review a good book about flower-arranging'. If you request a book and it turns out to be impossible for me to find, I reserve the right to ask you to pick something else-- I don't have an e-reader and I'm working with a good but by no means omnipotent library system. (If you have something you want to mail to me, either on a permanent or a temporary basis, we can talk about that.) If I've already read something and reviewed it, I'll point you to the review and you can pick something else; if I've already read it but not reviewed, I'm fine with writing up a reread.

3) Sign up by commenting with the amount of money you're donating and your book suggestion, e.g. '$25, and read a Heinlein juvenile'. Please note that all money goes to Rachel and you will be paying her via Paypal.

4) Timeframe-- Rachel will be doing a two-day or so actual read-a-thon; I will be doing this a little differently, in that I will read my books immediately upon obtaining them and hearing from Rachel that the donation's gone through. I'll write them up immediately after reading them. This means you could get a review tomorrow, if you want-- or in six weeks if you're mailing me something from Uzbekistan. Since I am not doing this in a two-day marathon, I do not have a restriction as to the length or density of the books involved, although seriously, if you want me to read War and Peace or Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics or something like that please consider having your donation reflect the difficulty/annoyance value.

Thank you, and I think this should be a lot of fun for everybody.

So I was meant to go up to Boston for Christmas, and up to Montreal for New Year's. As it turns out, I met sovay in NYC on the way up to Boston, and we went to handful_ofdust's reading at KGB, which was lovely, and that was the last thing that went as originally planned. sovay's grandfather died suddenly and all was sadness and chaos and logistics. (His memory for a blessing. I did not know him well, but everything I have heard was admirable.)

B. and my wife were in town for bits of time, too, though not for the funeral, and there was a lot of running about (faerieboots and rustycoon are heroes of the revolution for helping gaudior and me in Project Get Out Of The Grieving People's Hair So People Coming To The Funeral Can Use That Bed). I have a whole pile of Christmas presents I managed to forget to deliver to, like, everyone who was not twenty feet away from me at some point and in fact I failed to deliver some to people who were. Uh. I will manage this sometime in January I guess?

And then I came down with a nasty cold and so instead of going to Montreal I came back to B.'s and went to bed. Where I remain, about three weeks behind myself. (A Christmas season in which one only blows one significant writing deadline is... about average, actually, huh.)

The whole experience was, as is the way of such things, made a lot better by reading. As is her way, sovay handed me some really good books I hadn't read, and I read them. Most people do not do this with any frequency and it is one of the awesome things about my girlfriend that she can.

Urban fantasy, in the newer meaning of those words (i.e., more vampires, less Charles de Lint), is not really one of my genres. I have however read a fair bit of it, because I am always in search of new brain candy, and also I keep hoping somebody will do something not just fun but also good with it.

Tim Pratt? Totally did. His Marla Mason books are just plain good. Well, the first one is fun and has a lot of potential; the second through fourth are very good indeed; the fifth is epically awesomely heartbreakingly epic, and the sixth should be starting crowdfunded serialization right about now. (Oh and there's an inessential prequel novella and a lot of short stories.)

Marla Mason is an urban sorcerer who runs the city of Felport, somewhere on the U.S. East Coast. Felport, as far as I can tell, is a grungier iteration of New Haven. Marla likes grungy. She came up from street kid on a wave of being willing to do whatever it takes... to a point. Sorcerers basically dislike each other a lot of the time and can get pretty territorial, so there's a lot of political infighting. In the first book, Blood Engines, Marla and her sidekick Rondeau, a bodyswapping magical parasite of unknown origins currently inhabiting the body of a thirtysomething dude with horrible taste in suits, are in San Francisco trying to stave off a power play by one of Marla's vassals when they stumble into your classical I Will Subjugate The World By Summoning An Evil God Mwa Ha Ha plot on the part of a local guy. This book has a fair bit of travelogue and a lot of worldbuilding, and can get pretty info-dumpy. I like it because the world it builds has a fun everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to magic which nonetheless manages to avoid borking the overall metaphysics in the ways that have become almost traditional in its genre-- no secretly-everything-is-run-by-Biblical-angels-or-demons here-- and because, and this is positively bizarre for its genre, it is resolutely sex-positive, queer-friendly, kink-friendly, and populated by many people who are of many varied ethnicities who have agency and rounded characters and are not walking stereotypes. We haven't seen much of Marla's love life, but she's canonically bi; Rondeau is canonically It's Complicated; later in the series there's, will wonders never cease, a positively depicted and kickass asexual human character. Also, Marla is actually allowed to be ruthless. So: book one, fun.

Book two, Poison Sleep, is where the whole thing becomes awesome. There's an escapee from the hospital where Marla detains sorcerers who've gone too nuts to be responsible for their actions, and much of the book has to work as a result on multiple levels: the level of political reality and assassination and wondering whether the toilets have in fact been possessed by shit demons, and dream-logic, multi-valent surrealist image and the level of the escaped sorcerer's head. And it works. And it's beautiful. It's just purely beautiful, in images, in plotting, even occasionally in language.

And then the stakes go up, book by book, as the cast becomes larger and more fleshed out, as the limits of what Marla will and won't do become more obvious, as the metaplot of the series kicks in (boy howdy, does it). For reasons that confuse me deeply, the publisher dropped the series after book four, which ends on an extremely nasty cliffhanger. Book five may be found in its entirety at the series website, and I am going to buy a paper copy, because the author deserves my support, because book five did a whole bunch of things that this sort of novel doesn't do, including make me cry.

So the entirety of the holidays-that-weren't would have been much worse without those. You should totally all read them. I'm going to go stalk the author's LJ for updates on book six.

Thrud had an art history symposium or something of the sort related to her job that meant she had to go to Rome in the early morning; I followed in the afternoon. It's about a two-hour train from Florence to Rome, a fast ear-popping ride through the infinite tunnels necessary to navigate those famous Tuscan hills. Things flatten out a bit when you get into Latium.

The problem with taking the train into Rome is that although the train is the most civilized, cheapest, and friendliest way of traveling in Europe, in Rome it does mean you have to interact with Termini. Termini is the train station, on the very far east of town, and it's continuously crowded and very filthy, and there are no real signs, and no real explanations, and sometimes the ticket machines will for no reason refuse to take credit cards. It is also thronged with hucksters, con men, pickpockets, sneak thieves, and unlicensed cabs. It is, technically, a walkable distance from the parts of the city a tourist is most likely to be interested in-- it can't be more than a mile and a half from the Vittore Emmanuele monument, which is de facto Center City and right next to the Forum-- but you do not want to walk that mile-plus carrying whatever bags you have, because the streets are hilly and the cobbles are ankle-wrenching and the hucksters are persistent. (The pavement is peculiarly bad around Termini.) So the choices are cab, if you can afford it (and if you can you should) and the bus. The good news is that you will almost certainly not have to pay for the bus, because it will be too crowded for you to fight your way to the ticket slot, and because the system wherein you buy a ticket from... somewhere or other... and then use it in the buses is sufficiently complex that no one expects tourists to be able to navigate it, particularly since it is only labeled in Italian. The bad news about the bus is everything else. It will be hot, crowded, more crowded than that, so crowded that you will not need to hold on when it goes around curves because the people around you will hold you up. You will not get a seat. And it is full of-- well, for a while I thought of it as the Pervert Bus, after something from a Japanese video game, because there are a lot of those, and there is nothing to be done about it because no one has any elbow room; also, keep your possessions in your line of sight and if possible any zippers or closures on your bags in your grip at all times. But if you take it often enough you will be robbed anyhow.

I lost a small wallet with credit card and driver's license on my way out of Rome this time; I had sensibly split up card and cash, one in pocket and one in bag, so that hopefully only one could be swiped at any given point, and had also left my passport in Florence for safekeeping, but it is still extremely distressing to have something stolen. Somebody managed to open my bag, and I do not feel as bad about this as I would if they'd gotten into the pocket-- Thrud described to me a terrible time once when she could feel the guy taking her phone as the bus doors opened but had no space to do anything about it, and no one could grab him when she yelled, as he had already dived out. I do, however, feel pretty bad about it. It is violating and inconvenient and depersonalizing and makes you hate people, and you do need to report it to the cops ASAP because your bank, for instance, may well check with them, but all the cops can do is shrug expressively and tell you better luck next time.

It is also a bus on which people are prone to become ill, because it is so hot and crowded and makes such hairpin turns. It does at least two hundred and seventy degrees of arc around Trajan's Column, which might be nice if you could see out the windows. Fortunately we didn't have any of that wretchedness this time, because if somebody is ill the entire bus is shortly thereafter.

At any rate, on the way into town I got out at Largo Argentina, and there I was in Rome.

I don't know how to explain the precise difference between Rome and Florence, though it is a very definite quality and one you can feel instantly. It is not quite analogous to the U.S. difference between New York City and Boston, although that's a start, for Rome is larger, louder, noisier, more metropolitan, and Florence is smaller, quieter, more scholarly. It is a difference in period, since in Rome you have two options, the Christian and the pagan, the churches and the Baroque history or the Republic and the Empire, whereas Florence is entirely still in about 1520, thank you, and will be as long as she lives. But you might think that because Rome is larger and more disreputable, more full of thieves and scammers, that she might be less friendly, and that is the exact opposite of the case. Rome is Roma, which is Amor backwards, the City of Venus as she always has been, and Rome is an exuberantly loving city, an expansive, assertive, extrovert of an old bawd. Florence is a city that rewards you the more the more you learn about specific place, the powers and properties and moments of history, the trivia of all those painters and rulers. In Florence you will eventually begin to feel as though the Medici are real and close acquaintances. Florence is very friendly; Florence does want to be loved; but she will not reach out and make you love her. Rome will. Rome does not give a damn whether you know anything of her last three thousand years or not. All roads lead to her, so you're there, so it's a party. One never quite feels out-of-doors in Rome, because the streets, while wide, and the palazzos, while wider, are consistently full of people behaving as though they were in their own living rooms. Which they are. In 1999 when I first went to Rome I was amused and a little shocked because, at Eastertide and good weather, Rome was the first time I'd ever seen anyone make love outside, which they will do just sitting on the piazza benches next to you. This would never, ever happen in Florence. Florence has interior courtyards for that sort of thing, so that only the people who live in the same building see you; and that, I believe, is the difference.

Largo de Torre Argentina is a bus hub, an old temple complex smack in the middle of downtown which was excavated thoroughly a few decades back, so that it is well below street level. They threw a three-foot wall around it to stop people falling in when they had found out everything archaeological that could be found, and made it into a cat sanctuary. Cats, you see, are citizens of Rome and no cat born in the City may be removed from the City boundaries (this is a law), so there are quite a few strays and it was getting to be something of a problem. Now the City catches strays and neuters them and drops them off at Largo Argentina, where they are fed to make them stay, and do. If you live in the City permanently, you are permitted to adopt one. The rest of us can combine staring at old temples with staring at the cats. Most are very wild, but some are friendly and self-assured and will mug you for spare tidbits. I petted three or four this trip, mostly the large black odd-eyed ruffians who seem to be a family strain. Thrud and I were also delighted to see a surmise borne out: Rome has such a density of churches that it sometimes seems as though there is at least one on every block, and sure enough there was walking along at one point a cat who was all black except for a perfectly white and perfectly rectangular patch just under the chin. We aren't sure if his church is down in the cat sanctuary, but that he was a priest is obvious.

Some of the best street pizza in Rome can also be found just off Largo Argentina. Street pizza, pizza al taglio, is a Roman specialty findable only in a few other cities in Italy, and all over Rome. It is pizza made in brick ovens in giant rectangular pans on focaccia crust, hacked into smaller squares and sold by weight. It comes in flavors that don't exist anywhere else. One of the most classic Roman pizzas is potato, without tomato sauce, thinly sliced or shredded potatoes soaked for hours in olive oil and then baked on top of the focaccia to a not-quite-crispy snap. Sometimes this has rosemary, sometimes cheese. It is one of the best pizzas in the world, hearty without being overly heavy, because the potato is in such small pieces, salty chewy savory and less greasy than you would imagine. Other options: pancetta and fresh mozzarella di bufalo; cream of pumpkin, prosciutto, and smoked provolone; sardine and zucchini flower; radicchio and mortadella with tomato sauce; pesto and arugula. It's madly cheap, too, usually somewhere between one euro and two-fifty per hundred grams. The place off Largo Argentina has the regrettable name Pizza Florida but is some of the most impressive casual food I've ever had. You don't get tables, so you can take it over to sit on the rim of the temple wall and share your crusts with the cats. (One spends a great deal of time in Rome sitting on various outdoor things while eating. I also recommend the steps which lead up to the Giordano Bruno monument in Campo dei Fiori.)

However, when I first got there, after dropping my things at the hotel, I did not go for pizza. I had more important things to do.

I went to the Pantheon.

I had initially been intending to take a day trip to Bologna on Thanksgiving itself, since Thrud had Thanksgiving-related job things and it would make the day a bit different, but I woke up exhausted and in a significant quantity of pain-- this is not that unusual when I am in Europe, but this time it was the pain of I-carried-how-much-meat-up-those-stairs-yesterday? and I just didn't want to go to Bologna on top of that. So I decided to cross a couple more museums off the list of things I'd kind of like to see in Florence. It's a flexible list, because one is always running across new things; the major ones left for this trip now are climbing the Duomo (because it's there) and going to the pietra dura museum.

But on Thanksgiving I went to the Argenti Museum in the Pitti.

I have now come to a considered and deliberate conclusion: the Pitti Palace is too large. That is why there are six museums in it, plus a garden which has a grotto, a second garden, and another museum inside itself. They had to sub-divide it just because of its size. And each of those six museums is also too large. Usually, upon leaving a museum, I have some kind of impression about the museum as a whole, some single thought or mood that becomes my mental tag for the place. The Uffizi is almost cuddly, the Accademia is pretentious, the Louvre is surreally epic, that kind of thing. So far, both times I have been in the Pitti, my thoughts have distilled down to one clear and simple sentence, and it is unusual because it is not a sentence that traditionally ever crosses my mind at all. Here is my thought about the Pitti: oh God, where's the bar?

Ground floor, last door on the right as you go into the courtyard from the front entrance, diagonally next to the door into the garden. Fortunately it is very well marked, so that after your mind completely snaps from inability to deal with even one more second of this you can still find it. Also fortunately, it is in a nice simple plain white room undecorated in any way and with simple, basic, modern chairs and tables because somebody out there understands. Of course, they are going to rob you blind, but the human down-to-earth honesty of this transaction almost made me weep.

Mind you, the Argenti is enough to drive anyone to hysteria. The official English translation is the Treasure Museum, although Argenti really means silver, and it is All The Precious Medici Stuff. I don't know whether it's the worst museum in Europe or one of the best. It is certainly one of the most terrifying.

It does, unequivocally, have the best fresco cycle ever, period. On one wall, you have barbarians and demons attacking classical civilization. There are hideous winged things chewing on the flanks of unicorns, and the Muses being menaced by big guys with swords, and people setting fire to Greek ruins, and so on. On the next wall, Lorenzo de Medici is welcoming the Muses into Florence, with a graceful outstretched hand. They look tired, but so relieved. Then there's a narrow panel of Truth reassuring Lorenzo that Aristotle and Neo-Platonism are compatible with Christianity. There is no text in the fresco, but damn, that's unmistakably what that is. Lorenzo also has a look of pure intellectual relief-- you can tell he was mildly worried about this. Then you have a wall with Lorenzo enthroned, surrounded by the great artisans of Florence as young men, each holding a model of his greatest work, and it is, of course, the Renaissance roll call. I can't even remember whether the Muses are in that picture, but does it matter? Best fresco cycle.

However, that's not what's on display. What's on display is, for instance, five hundred and ninety-seven almost identical gold platters with scenes from the Gospels on them. Or six hundred cameos with heads of famous women. In one case. Or thirty-five little fiddly ivory things, each carved with extreme delicacy and care to be the most spectacular little fiddly ivory thing it can possibly be. If there were one of it, it would be amazing, but because there's an entire case your brain is unable to comprehend all the little fiddly bits at the same time and decides to step out for a tea break. Or the exact twin of that terrible rock crystal reliquary from San Lorenzo, only it's worse because it has models of Dominican saints around the bottom which means that they look like ebony and ivory penguins. Or the exact twin of that terrible relief of the Duke from San Lorenzo, only it's much, much worse because instead of being made chastely though tastelessly in silver it is made in distressing full-color precious stones, so that the Medici arms are rubies in gold and the Duke's face is rose gold and his doublet is emerald stripes and lapis and it's just blindingly execrable.

There is a room in the Argenti devoted entirely to gadgets made out of deformed pearls. No, really. The artisan would take a deformed pearl and say, clearly God intended this to be the hump of a camel, although in fact God intended no such thing and probably the opposite, and then the artisan would graft a camel's neck and head and legs and tail onto the thing in extremely precious materials and say, oh, look, I have cunningly made it obvious what this particular deformed pearl really looks like. And then one of the Medici daughters would buy it, so that we centuries later could stare at it and say, that is the worst miniature of a camel I have ever, ever seen. There are deformed-pearl babies' cradles. Ships in sail. Insects. Harlequins with pearl legs. Mermaids with pearl tails. The mind begins to bleed.

And then there's what I think of as the display problem. You see, there will be a room, and it will have the aforementioned five hundred and ninety-seven almost identical gold platters with scenes from the Gospels on them hung on three walls, and against the fourth wall there will be a little case containing a cup made from a nautilus shell, which is all mother-of-pearl and amber. So you spend some time with that cup, you really appreciate it, because it is the only object in the room that is not overindulgently hyper-excessively too much, and you get a little dizzy when you try to look directly at the platters.

And then you will step into the next room, and there will be five hundred and ninety-seven almost identical mother-of-pearl cups made from nautilus shells in cases around three of the walls, and against the fourth wall there will be a little case containing a porcelain miniature portrait of an aristocratic relative, and I'm sure you see where this is going. This happens over and over and over in the Argenti. I do not know why they do this except to torment you. The point of this museum is to break you against the wealth and power of the Medici, the sheer weight of how damn much stuff they had, and oh, it certainly does that. If spread out into more reasonable configurations, a lot of this might not hurt at all, although a lot of it would just be terrible anywhere. (Tiny teasets made from amber. Coral crucifixes where the artist intended to use the natural growth of the coral to make the shapes, which works about as well as the deformed-pearl art. Porphyry Roman statues missing their heads, so that there are new Renaissance marble heads on them and the deficiency is glaringly obvious.)

There is an ivory horse carved, freestanding, inside a tiny ivory cage, and the horse and cage are linked by a carved ivory chain.

Okay, I get it, I'm impressed already-- this museum has three separate pope hats! Sewn with gold, embroidered with silver, dripping with diamonds, family arms in platinum chasings-- (when I told Thrud I'd been to the Argenti, afterwards, she looked reflective and said, 'yeah, it's an amazing museum, isn't it, no one should miss it, it's just full of things the human race shouldn't do. It's like, you don't make a sequel to Dude, Where's My Car and you don't do whatever the hell is up with the Argenti, you just don't do that.') A Mesoamerican jade mask looking confused and lonely and out of place, what is that even doing here, and a giant enamel crucifixion set, with about three hundred individual little tiny figures of separate people all of whom are carved in a distinctly anatomically uncanny-valley style, and the only non-historical sittable bench for visitors is in front of this giant furniture object, where I looked at the sign to see what it was and the sign said it was a Bavarian portable writing-desk containing a household devotional altar and, I am not making this up, a spice rack--

oh, God, where's the bar?

So you see. It's deeply hilarious, though it's also kind of torture by museum.

A sitdown and a drink and a nice sandwich from Gusto Panino revived me enough to go to an entirely different kind of museum, the exhibit on Renaissance banking at the Palazzo Strozzi.

I believe we left off at the I Tatti art collection. I suspect I was standing in front of the altarpiece of St. Francis*, which is the most important and impressive piece they have and which is astounding sixteenth-century work. Francis is standing on the ocean, a la the Birth of Venus, and crushing under his feet Lust (a maiden leaning on a cinghiale, for the wild boar are the animals which multiply most uncontrollably in Tuscany), Pride (an armed warrior couched on a lion) and Avarice (an old woman counting her money while spinning, her wheel pressing on the head of a dog or she-wolf). There is an aureole around Francis reminiscent of the Venus's sea-shell, scarlet bright and filled with the heads and wings of seraphs, which makes this painting heretical as only Christ or Mary or God are entitled to seraphic encirclement. Above him hover the angels of Francis's three virtues, to whom he is mystically married: the angel of Chastity, the angel of Poverty, and the angel of Obedience. Chastity carries lilies, the symbol of virginity, and Obedience a yoke; but Poverty has bare feet, her hair down, and patches on her leather dress. Poverty's dress is amazing. It is undoubtedly going against the spirit of the painting, but everyone I know who has seen this who wears dresses would like a replica, including myself. It has a debonair, angelic air while still being decidedly leather and patchy and downmarket. (Its awesomeness only kind of comes across in the photo.)

This altarpiece is in the parlor, which as with the other house-rooms at I Tatti is decorated with priceless art in a delicate mixture of styles and periods. On the nineteenth-century cabinet in front of and below the altarpiece Berenson put eighth and ninth-century Chinese bronzes, and they fit and do not clash, because his taste was so careful and exquisite. Dark wood, red and gold brocades and rugs, graceful porcelain and metal things on the furniture; and each sacred painting has a table or shelf or cabinet before it in a position that suggests an altar. These are livable rooms, with comfortable modern chairs and couches in patterns which go with the rugs, and windows out to the gardens, and bookshelves where the books still are. It's noteworthy that when Berenson finished decorating I Tatti he stopped buying paintings, even though he could by that time have afforded work of much greater fame and notoriety than he had been able to manage when he started. He was thinking of the house, not of the museum; the people, not the historical. And yet all the documentation is there, the catalogues and provenances in the library, the books and pamphlets the villa puts out for those not fortunate enough to be able to walk through it. It is in a liminal space between public and private, library and mansion, house and college, for the director and his family do live in the closed rooms off which we admire the possible Giotto and the tenth-century Japanese screen. A window-seat looking out on a kaki tree, nook lined with volumes, and a neat little soapstone snake on the table, a cheerful place for any scholar to sit and work and fiddle with things, but the volumes are Sanskrit eighteenth-century originals and the snake is Mesoamerican and lined with purple jade: that's I Tatti, and you're still allowed to sit there.

A fact which is brought home when we finish the tour and go down for tea, because tea is in the parlor, yes that selfsame parlor, in fact the tea-carts are directly under St. Francis and I am told the morning coffee-urns actually sit on the cabinet in front of him. Thrud and I drink tea and eat tiny house-made cookies full of marzipan and bitter orange and pignoli and stare at St. Francis, and talk with the fellows and academics who have come starving out of the library woodwork to cram in some sugar before going back to the late afternoon research (the tired time of day, before dinner, and dinner is formal, with the period table and period uncomfortable chairs in the forbidding dining room full of medieval martyrs; tea is less formal and has better sofas) and we stare at St. Francis, and show them our lens-cloths with interesting pictures on them and continue to stare at St. Francis. Being permitted to eat in this room is rather like the concept of taking a picnic basket into the Louvre: it would certainly be nice if you could do it, but no one's going to let you, and even if they did, somehow, it would feel peculiar and as though you were not respecting something, or perhaps wore the wrong shoes. But here there are no wrong shoes, because the parlor is for tea and the receiving of company and that's what it was designed to do. One is left with only the faint disbelief, the desire to somehow live up to the villa. I was glad Thrud lent me some good clothes, as my usual penniless-grad-student-style attire just doesn't work at I Tatti. In such artful surroundings it feels wrong not to be polished.

Then through the quiet library, modern shelving but with urns in a set of differing sizes meant to make the spaces into one long perspective with the garden; and in the spacious reading-room there it was. The Worst Piece Of Art In Florence. I had been told to expect it but it was still hard to believe.

It's a fresco. Berenson commissioned it at some point in I think the twenties and was out of town while most of the painting happened; when he came home and saw it he threw the artist bodily out of the house, so the bottom frieze is unfinished which is really just as well. How to communicate this-- imagine poor attempts at the Impressionist brushstroke of van Gogh, with the color palette of a Wyeth, only a lot more neon, a lot of pinks and purples and acid greens in very coarse linework. Now imagine that someone has executed a lot of nudes in the classical style in this manner, but can't draw very well, and also is limited by having no realistic skin-tones in the colorways and no ability to put in fine detail given the coarseness. Also the nudes are all posed in strained and confusing poses which make it impossible to tell what they are doing, except that the gentleman at the very far right is doing downward-facing dog, on a yoga mat, despite, as I said, being obviously classical.

It's a sight to make eyes sore. They had it covered with white canvas during Berenson's lifetime but then the artist became famous and this is his largest work, so they took the canvas down. Truly and entirely worth a visit, though I feel sorry for Berenson about the thing; I think he was very restrained in his treatment of the artist, I'd probably have thrown in a punch or two for good measure.

After coming back from I Tatti, Thrud and I went to dinner at Bordino. Bordino is a hole-in-the-wall in the Oltrarno, shoved into a medieval cellar. It has truffle cream pasta which does not do the annoying thing where they shave bits of truffle over something so that it's all crunchy, but rather has the truffle infused into the sauce so the aroma and flavor come through as fully as possible; it has lobster pasta which is a perfect blend of spicy, sweet, and sea-broth; and it is where you go for bistecca alla Fiorentina. Bistecca alla Fiorentina is Florence's only claim to the world of high cuisine, for most of the food is rustic here, tripes and stews and porridges. The steak has a spice rub, but that's barely noticeable, because the important thing is how it's cooked. It's a very fatty cut, very thick, and the outside is charred, with a layer of well-done. Then as you proceed inward it becomes less and less cooked, until the center is still cool and red and untouched by heat at all. So you get all degrees of doneness in one steak, and the point is the contrast between them, which I wouldn't have thought to be as interesting as it turned out to be, but it really is, the textures, flavors, and temperatures blending in each bite. Also they serve it with lemon, which is just peculiar but certainly different. Bordino's does not break the bank, which is great because around here people charge the earth for bistecca alla Fiorentina, but no, Bordino will do you this steak dinner with primi and house wine and dolci for about thirty-five euros per person, which is ludicrous. The dolci are nothing to write home about but by that point one is too full of steak, so it doesn't matter.

* Link goes to Thrud's blog, which, as I have mentioned, you should totally read

On Monday morning Thrud and I got up early to go to the Biblioteca Laurenziana. It closes at like noon and is open way before the church is. You go up an interior stairway in the cloister, and then into a room which has no purpose other than the entrance stairs designed by Michelangelo. They are great stairs, with three flowing stepways, the outer two rectangular and the middle one a sequence of attenuated ovals. The issue is the room they're in, which was built for this-- they put another floor on the building so they could have A Stairway-- and it feels odd that you approach them from the side instead of the front, and the room is too tall for its length. But the stairs themselves came out very well, and you even get to go up them when you go into the reading room. Because you have to. Believe me, if there were a way to get you into the reading room without having you walk on Michelangelo, somebody would arrange it, but there isn't.

The reading room is long and high and narrow and has an intricate carved-wood ceiling with fake animal skulls, which sounds like a terrible motif but is somehow carried off here. It's lined with combination lecterns/chairs/shelves, amazing pieces of furniture where you lift the slanted lid to find the row of volumes, close the lid to prop the volume on while reading it, and even get to sit down while doing so. Well, they don't keep the books there anymore; there are too many. But it was comfortable, and it is the first library in Europe to have a catalogue, in that at the end of each lectern row there is a wooden placard hung on the end-cap with the names carved into it of all the volumes that were shelved in that row. Walking down you pass Latin History, Latin Poetry, Hebraica, Liturgica, the entire inventory of the original Laurenziana right there out in front of you. Hypnotic. One spends time looking for one's favorite authors, determining their shelf positions: is Aristotle under Philosophy? Under Rhetoric? (Some in both, sensibly.) Are we still in the era of considering pseudo-Aristotle Aristotle, and are they distinguished? (Yes, and no.)

Then the end leads into Special Exhibitions, which at the moment was Surgery in the Renaissance. Codices of Avicenna, Trotula, Galen; cautery knives and Byzantine bandaging diagrams; a picture of someone doing surgery on Hannibal with everyone dressed as a fourteenth-century Florentine, from a book about Carthaginian medicine. Incunabulae and parchment fragments, three rooms of priceless knowledge from the Romans on forward, ending in a case with plates from Diderot's Encyclopedia showing the same cases of surgical instruments that have appeared in century after century: a testament both to the transmission of knowledge, and the ways in which, sometimes, things don't advance as quickly as one might like them to.

November 23rd

The Laurenziana giftshop, like several other giftshops in Florence, sells cloths with which to clean the lenses of your glasses. The cloths have interesting and appropriate things printed on them, such as the painting from the Duomo of Dante explaining his cosmology. There is a different set of images available depending on which shop you go to, and the Laurenziana is noteworthy because they have one which is an illuminated manuscript page which turns out, when unfolded, to be a portrait of Ficino. You can't find that out until you buy it because it is folded in a way that makes it look very generic. These lens-cloths are not only scenic but amazingly useful; the difference between cleaning glasses with one of them and cleaning them on an ordinary piece of cloth is dazzling. I will probably wind up getting many of them, because they combine the categories of presents nicely: useful, beautiful, place-specific, cheap.

Then we went down to the crypt and saw the more conventional bits of Cosimo's tomb, which looks like an ordinary tomb because all the porphyry is on top. There's also a tomb in which are buried some bones which were in the right place and of the correct age to be Donatello's, and which contained some lead residue of the sort that accumulated in the bones of artists of that period, so they put up a nice plaque and rely on hope.

The crypt also contains a chunk of the Medici silver. There's another chunk over at the Argenti museum in the Pitti, which I haven't seen yet, but I have to say, this family could revolutionize art and science, build great cathedrals, patronize music that is still played and poems which are still read, but good God did they have terrible taste in reliquaries and other silver objects. This is the most garish, overdone, frighteningly ornamented, badly sculpted silver exhibition I have ever been in*. It's amazing. Putti with faces blown out like balloons, a relief of one of the Medici dukes that might just as well have carved on it in letters of fire LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME, a bishop's crozier with poorly articulated sheep gamboling up it... but the piece of greatest resistance is a reliquary. This reliquary is carved in the shape of the dome of San Lorenzo, which looks just like the dome of Santa Maria della Fiore except for being much smaller and having tiles with rounded bottoms instead of square bottoms. But the tiles in the reliquary are made of rock crystal. One just stares at it in horror. It is bizarrely translucent, so you can see all the interior wires, and it fails on every conceivable artistic level. It is not, quite, the worst art in the city; I would see that the following day. But it's right up there.

Afterward we went back into the church for a while, spending some more time in the sacristy, which has a beautiful lapis zodiac dome over one of the alcoves. And then Thrud went to work, and I went to the Museo dell Opera du Duomo.

The Museum of the Works of Santa Maria della Fiore is a museum which has no need to brag. It contains all the important, interesting, or aesthetic objects which have been removed from the Cathedral due to changing fashions or replacement by different objects. Which is to say, it's the museum for things the Florentines didn't think were quite good enough at the time but refuse to get rid of. And this is why the museum, without ever having to do any actual bragging, in itself constitutes a boost to the Florentine ego: it is full of Donatello, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, and della Robbia. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT WASN'T CONSIDERED GOOD ENOUGH. BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THEY HAVE BETTER STUFF IN THERE.

I mean, mostly the people who took these things out of the Duomo were wrong-- the new choir stalls, for instance, may be larger but they aren't as good as the Donatello and that's all there is to it. But it's a museum which exudes a subtle smugness.

Highlights are the aforementioned Donatello choir stall and its match by della Robbia, both of which take as subject the praising of God through music and are covered with joyous statues of laughing children and angels playing medieval instruments. Neither slips into sentimentality, somehow. There's also a nice Michelangelo Pietà, not the one you're thinking of of course because that's in Rome, but the one from his old age, where he carved his own features into Nicodemus who carries Christ: an anguished composition by a man who has spent years afraid of death, and powerful although unfinished. Brunelleschi's tools are there, levers and diagrams and the competition entries from the competition in which he won the right to do the dome, and also all the entries from every competition which has ever been held about the church, which is a lot of them. The terrible eighteenth-century propositions for the new facade are pretty amazing and one is very glad they didn't happen. There are the original statues from before the new Cathedral, from before all this modern remodeling that made it into della Fiore instead of Santa Reparata, i.e. the things that were above the door and so on from before 1296; there are some Roman mosaics people found in the back; there are the original statues and reliefs from the bell tower, since the ones up there now are copies for conservation reasons.

I was glad to see an explanation of the iconography of the bell tower because it is very confusing and Thrud and I had spent a half hour or so staring at it from the ground and trying to make it out and gotten nowhere. The explanation, while not ridiculously helpful, did clear up that the top tier of reliefs are the Planets, the Cardinal and Theological Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments; the bottom tier remains a muddle.

Unlike many other museums in Florence, the Museo dell Opera du Duomo believes in both bathrooms and English-language signage. Well, mostly English-language. A greater percentage than in other museums is bilingual, let's put it that way, so at least forty percent of it has something English. I can read Italian reasonably, as one Romance language is much like another, but it takes more mental effort and makes the museums more tiring, so I am glad when I don't have to. (I can't really speak it. I can understand it when it is spoken to me, but when I try to speak it my grammar goes entirely to hell. I can write it, though, because one has more time.) And the museum is a pleasant building with an atrium and interior benches and views of the Duomo from every window, which is correct.

* Until the Argenti Museum. Entry coming eventually.

Which is entirely about food:

I mean the day, itself, was entirely about food, because we got up in the morning and went over to the Mercato Centrale. There are two large markets in Florence, Centrale and San Ambrogio, and each is open mornings except Sundays and surrounded by a forest of fly-by-night stalls and hucksters. Centrale is a playground of food, an overdose of sensory detail. Butcher shops: tripe in white, honeycombed piles, since tripa alla Fiorentina is one of the local specialties and you can get tripe at every street cart in the city-- there's a tripe cart down our street that has lines around the block, although I haven't dared try it yet. Pig's heads, pig's trotters, calves' heads, whole suckling pigs for roasting, infinite sausages, liver and lights wrapped in white caul fat and glistening that dark red that only comes from blood too chilled to be clotted. The cured meats, lardo which isn't lard but rather like a ham version of bacon; mortadella, like a ham version of butter; prosciutto like nothing else in the world, and spiced pancetta dripping black pepper. Cheese shops, mostly local cheeses, the truffle cheese that is this area's major export in the cheese direction and the mozzarellas and ricottas that are too delicate and perishable to be exported (pity the rest of the world). Vegetable shops, piled with the young Italian zucchini that is harvested weeks earlier than anyone in the U.S. seems to get around to picking theirs and is, consequently and alone of the world's zucchini, more than edible; with the radicchio Trevisiano that I had to ask about because it is, literally, purple and white tentacles and looks like a small octopus or squid with roots at one end of it, and it turned out to be radicchio; with early oranges and chestnuts and clementines, with the very last of the figs and redcurrants. Fish stalls, full of rays and the black tiger shrimp of the Mediterranean and piles of baccalà, that salted cod that has to be soaked in water for forty-eight hours before it is survivable as a foodstuff. Oil stores, pastry shops, honey stores, pasta shops, you name it. It's an arched and cavernous building, intentionally colder than the air outside to keep everything nice and crisp and fresh, which means that on a not-too-warm November day you cannot, quite, see your breath in there.

Which really only sinks in when you sit down to eat lunch, because casing the joint is one thing but shopping while hungry is stupid. The restaurant in Mercato Centrale that is the good one is called Pork's, and it looks like nothing at all. It has a couple of chairs, with no kitchen in sight from them, a lot of Halloween decorations and old Christmas lights strung up in a desultory way around the chairs, and a couple of signs with a smiling cartoon pig. It also has an almost totally unhelpful space heater, and an adorable and friendly waitress who does not speak any English. If you are fortunate enough to realize that it is a restaurant and sit down, you will find a menu of assorted intensely delicious and cheap pastas and the best porchetta sandwich in the city. Porchetta is a local specialty I can basically summarize as sandwich of roast suckling pig. They have a pig over there, and they cut little bits off from all over it and shove them in a panino, so you get a whole bunch of different cuts and if you're lucky some of the basting liquid, hot, spiced, and soaking into the bread. The fiori di zucca (zucchini flower) pasta is not on the menu because it takes them so much work to make, but they do have it, and it's symphonic, cream and flower and slight sweet basil and pasta hand-tossed in the morning. Prosciutto served wrapped around tagliatelle stuffed with sheep ricotta, two competing shades of salty melting. Rice fritters called arranzino, little oranges, which are rice balls shaped around house sausage, peas, and soup broth, breaded and fried: warm in the hands and an ever-changing array of textures.

Thrud started coming to Pork's when she was working at the Biblioteca Laurenziana, which is basically next door, and there was no reason for her not to eat there every day. As a result, she and the waitress are on very friendly terms, and one spends much of a meal eaten at Pork's with Thrud in being helpful by talking in English and French and bad what-have-you to passers-by who do not speak Italian and are wandering along cross and hungry and unaware that there is, two feet to the right of them, a very good restaurant. If they sit down they always come and thank you after they taste the food.

But Pork's does not do dessert, so we split an orange-peel muffin from the pastry stall before doing our shopping.

After an afternoon spent at home quietly knitting except for the part where we nipped out for some gelato and hot chocolate-- museums are mostly closed Saturday afternoons and we were both tired-- oh! I forgot to mention the tragedy! Per che non has closed for vacation until December seventh, when I shall not be in town any longer, so I have had the last of their fruiti di bosco for this trip and I wish they'd given me some warning. But it doesn't work like that in Italy. So we have to walk down the Corso to RivaReno for gelato now, a ten-minute walk instead of a two-minute one. (Grom, which is famous, is closer but not quite as good.) RivaReno is very new and does not have many flavors, but the ones they have are stellar: chestnut glacée (the chestnut here functions the way the peanut does in the U.S. and I approve of that), almond and hazelnut with amaretto and candied nut crunch, crema with balsamic vinegar poured over it, amaretto-soaked cherries chopped over fiore di panna ('flower of cream', which is distinct from crema, although both are, technically, cream-flavored gelato; the difference is that crema has eggs and is trying to taste like the platonic ideal of plain gelato, whereas fiore di panna has no eggs and is trying to taste like the platonic ideal of new heavy cream, an ambition which produces major differences in the results). We found out today that they'll pour hot fudge into the bottom of your cone before giving it to you. Also, and this is very dangerous on a cold day when you've just had ice cream, they are within sight of Vestri, and Vestri sells a demi of sixty-five percent drinking chocolate for one. frickin'. euro. I have no idea how they can do that but they do.

While walking home drinking chocolate we encountered one of Florence's numerous religious processions. I have never seen Hare Krishnas accompanying themselves on the accordion before. Kind of a jazz beat thing going. Painted faces and their robes accessorized by fingerless gloves and warm earmuffs. A smiling young lady gave me a devotional sweet. I have no idea what it was besides fairly tasty and with coconut on top of it. (The guys behind the counters of the shops were eating them and seemed to know the Hare Krishnas, so I figured this probably happens a lot, and Thrud says she's seen them before.) Straight down the Corso they went dancing until we turned off and heard their cymbals fade into the distance.

Then it was time to cook dinner, from the things we had bought at the market.

It is porcini season. This means fresh porcini mushrooms. Not dried. Not vacuum-packed, not freeze-dried. Picked this morning in the woods somewhere, damp with dirt still on them, since you cannot farm porcini. At twenty-five euros the kilo, one mushroom per person is still under five euros, and they are large mushrooms, at least six inches long with stem and four or five in cap diameter. We wiped them off gently with damp paper to preserve the delicate gills, quartered them, and fried them with olive oil and a quantity of salt. That was our primi. The stems are sweet, and have a texture, well, imagine if boiled asparagus were pleasant. The caps are earthy, with notes of basil, and are so meaty that it's hard to imagine they have no associated meat. They'd picked up a crunchy charred crust which gave a little snap to them. The gills are jelly-like, dissolving in the mouth. There's no reason not to do this every evening.

Secondi: that young zucchini, sliced very very thinly and fried in olive oil with garlic until half of it was crunchy and half had pretty much dissolved into shreds; burger patties from the market. One pork with artichoke, one pork with porcini essence, one speck with sheep's cheese. As I have mentioned, speck is like bacon, only ham. A speck/ground pork burger with spots of melted cheese, over the universe's only good zucchini-- Thrud put it in her mouth and said “It's unicorn meat. It's magical. You can tell.” Yes. You can.

Then she went and got the new I Tatti olive oil and we had it over ricotta of almost the quality of the stuff in that restaurant the other day, because apparently the meal was not ridiculous enough or something.

Dessert: one custard bun or something like it, anyhow custard and pastry, bought at the market; one slice panforte, ditto; two kaki. The custard bun was a custard bun and they are the same anywhere. Panforte is the bastard child of gingerbread, fudge, and fruitcake. Imagine the spicy richness of a medium-strength gingerbread, mixed thoroughly with dried/candied fruit, nuts, and whatever else happens to be around (marshmallows, you get, chocolate chunks, peppermint rock), made the consistency of fudge so that it melts in your mouth when you eat it and given a strong taste of caramelized brown sugar. It keeps forever, too, so I am hauling a whole bunch home with me, as I am told Vestri makes a chocolate version.

Kaki is Japanese persimmon. It looks, on the outside, like a large orange tomato, but you don't eat the outside. Inside there are, mixed together, a sweet orange-colored juice, a sweet-astringent reddish-orange goo comprising a liquidish pulp and the seeds, and chunks of fruit the consistency of Turkish Delight or a really good jelly-baby, which taste rather like orange-flower water. Kaki is a winter fruit which comes to full growth after its leaves fall, so the trees are black wood with giant red balls all over them, making their own winter ornaments. It's very good in Italy and you can get it everywhere; I had one in Texas last year and it was kind of disgusting.

And that was today, because really, as I said, it was entirely about food. That, and discovering that the Biblioteca Laurenziana has an exhibition on about Renaissance surgery, as we walked by it, so I mean to go to that later in the week when it's open. But mostly food.

The smells of Florence: piss, tobacco, drains, incense, the musk that is the base of some perfumes and stays when the perfume has worn off the person who put it on in the morning, lighted candles, shit, roasting chestnuts, evergreens, citrus, stone.

The colors: stucco white-yellow, terra-cotta red, slate blue, stone sand, clear sky (it's winter light already).

The feel: cobbles under feet, cold air.

I did get to the Bargello, which is pretty much the attic of Florence. It's an eleventh-century public building which has been palazzo and keep and prison, made into a museum when somebody discovered the Oldest Known Portrait Of Dante in it, which to the Florentines is enough to consecrate it forever. The downstairs sculpture room has a fair bit of Cellini, including the original base of the Perseus, which is probably the only statue base of which I am aware to include an entirely separate statue of the same figure on it-- the base has young Perseus posing with Danaë, along with depictions of Zeus, Apollo, and Athene, a family group. Cellini's Ganymede is there also, hands, feet, and eagle added to a classical Bacchus to guarantee that no critic, ever, would know what to say about it; critics can become so uncomfortable with art which has no obvious parentage, no single voice which can be seen as the work's genius. Cellini and the Roman piece work together very well, I think; it's a Bacchus which has fairly Mannerist hair anyway, one of those updos with a lot of tiny curlicues, so the featherwork of the eagle is saved from being overfussy by textural harmony with the head. In that room there's a good Apollo, too, with Hyacinthus, an Apollo who really is noble and young and graceful and poised on the edge of tragedy, my mental image of the one that spoke to Rilke that one time.

The rest of the Bargello can be handily described as fifteen or so rooms full of five hundred Renaissance hairpins. In which Donatello's David is standing and looking rather embarrassed, if indeed any expression is visible under his very peculiar hat. Okay, okay, not quite all hairpins. But they seem to have bought anything museum-worthy that nobody else wanted, ivories of Byzantium, chessboards and backgammon sets, arms and armor of four centuries, medals of every ruler and duke and minor nobleman from the nearby vicinity who ever had one struck, more della Robbia porcelain figure sets than I bet were ever in the della Robbia workshop at a single time. A room of Islamic art that wandered west somehow. You name it. There are some lovely and charming things, and some frankly bad art, and all in the same case. It's entertaining but a bit tiring; a lot of the objects are very small. It is possible to get eyestrain from museums and I think that I have done it.

In a case in the room of bronzes there is another portrait of the dwarf Morgante, this time riding a nautilus shell on the back of a sea dragon. He is perfectly recognizable. I need to look to see if anything is known about his life.

In the courtyard there are two stone lions, each with a lion cub under its foot, wearing large iron crowns of the classical crown-shape (resembling muffins), embossed with fleur-de-lis. The combination of marble and iron is ridiculous but faintly dignified, and the cubs are sheltered and playful.

After the Bargello I stopped briefly at a dolceria and had a sachertorte, which was necessary or I would have fallen over entirely, and then I went to the Pitti Palace, which I should not have done on that day. It is because I hadn't been before and didn't know how large it is. The Pitti is six museums and a garden in one building, three stories high and a maze of passages and signs and guard stations and sudden gift shops. Unlike every other museum in Florence, it does have sufficient bathrooms, but this is small consolation when you're wondering what floor you're on and whether you're ever going to find your way out again. Not that you would necessarily want to. I went to the Costume Museum first, which is up at the very top, of course, because the things one wants to go to are the farthest away. It's pretty good, although I wish they would display more by way of older clothing. At the moment, there are a lot of twentieth-century evening dresses which are being shown so that we can see how they have taken elements from the two or three seventeenth- and eighteenth-century outfits that are next to them in the cases. In proportion I would have preferred this to be the other way around.

Interspersed with this was the temporary exhibition which has now overtaken most of the Pitti, and which I frankly find hilarious. It's titled 'La Bella Italia', and is supposed to be a hymn to the glory of Italy's cities (and former city-states), a celebration of the different art styles and beauties of each one. So you'll be walking through the Costume Museum, and suddenly there's a room labeled 'Turin', and it's full of Turin, in landscape-painting format. Maps of Turin, drawings of Turin, maybe a couple of portraits of People Who Were Important To Turin. And there are rooms like this for lots of different cities.

Then there is the room About Florence, which is actually three rooms, and it has: a Botticelli (Athena and the Centaur). A Michelangelo. The portrait of Dante standing in front of his cosmology, on loan from the Duomo, so you can get right up close and really look at the details of Dante. That portrait of Machiavelli, the one that winds up on more than half of the book covers, the one without the hat. A fresco of Boccaccio. A fresco of Petrarch. And on and on and on, and there are not, in fact, any landscape paintings.

Now, I realize that all the best things that have been made in Turin are, as they should be, basically in Turin, and that Turin is not going to send its best to an exhibition in Florence; also that all Florence's best stuff is right here. Still. The distinct impression one gets is that there is a message being sent here, which I would summarize as 'it's not that we're better than you, it's just that we're better than you'. I mean, there is a (terrible) statue in the Bargello of Firenze, in the Guise Of A Lady, Overcoming Pisa, and while they did not bring this statue over to the Pitti for this exhibition, it wouldn't have seemed out of place.

I have to go back to the Pitti. I didn't even manage to make it into the garden.